Any university that takes a bribe in exchange for swearing loyalty to any aspect of Trump's ideology is abandoning its legitimacy as an institution of higher education. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

The chancellor of Texas Tech has apparently ordered faculty to ignore the scientific research literature when teaching about the psychology of gender (at least in the classroom). This undermines the credibility of a psychology degree from Texas Tech. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

Academic freedom should protect honest criticism of Charlie Kirk, even if the criticism is delivered with an irreverent tone. My new opinion piece on Syracuse.com: www.syracuse.com/opinion/2025...

Forms of Psychological Bias Against Transgender Women and Men and People with Nonbinary Gender Identities -- now online at Personality and Social Psychology Review. Main article: doi.org/10.1177/1088... Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... #SocialPsychology #IntergroupBias #Transgender #Nonbinary

Political violence is bad. Killing people for their opinions is bad. If you agree, you should speak out against Charlie Kirk. Unlike most of his current detractors, Charlie Kirk supported political violence.

Every chance you get, say “fuck you” to authoritarian demands. One of the regime’s tools is making people believe resistance is futile—that acquiescence is the only option. But especially for those with power and privilege, the most basic, necessary act is to say: FUCK YOU.

Another day wasted when university presidents & chancellors could have been in front of microphones. The total lack of loud public collective action condemning this & explaining to Americans why this is a complete disaster is utterly maddening. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Thousands of people gathered peacefully in Syracuse this afternoon to protest against Trump's and Musk's senseless destruction. (Pictured: my hastily-lettered sign reading "Hands off our beloved transgender Americans, immigrants, and students" on the front and "Hands off democracy" on the back.)

"The free movement of our international community members is therefore essential to the functioning of the University and serving our mission." More public declarations of this sort are urgently needed. Let Tufts serve as a role model for other universities.

We are excited to announce our official partnership with @indivisible.org for the National Day of Action on April 5th! Stand Up for Science says: HANDS OFF OUR SCIENCE! #standupforscience #handsoffourscience Find and register for an event near you: handsoff2025.com?utm_source=s...

When Cory Booker is finally finished with this speech, we should remember an important lesson from it. Even when we are not sure precisely what to do, we must keep talking to remind ourselves that the unfolding catastrophe is not normal, acceptable, or inevitable.

No government ever has the right to arrest someone for criticizing the government or its allies. Any government that regularly does so abandons its claim to legitimate authority. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2... www.reuters.com/world/us/tuf... www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words! If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance. www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

CALL TO ACTION FOR ALL WHO SUPPORT HIGHER ED: Please join us in signing this public commitment to the value and values of higher ed as a crucial part of healthy democracies, and calling on our leaders to actively defend us against attack! bit.ly/DemocracyAnd...

Attacks on DEIA programs cause harm by interfering with the programs themselves, but also by raising questions about who really belongs on campus. This open letter is a good opportunity (one among many) for faculty to tell students that we value diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

New post! smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/its-fine-i...

The concept of "conflict of interest" is vital to understanding why strict freedom of speech protections are among the most important limits placed on government.

Had fun at the Stand Up for Science event! Here's my sign (and me holding it backwards to be pro-pet food). Scientific advances dramatically alleviate the burden of disease/illness and has made many areas of life better and more equitable. We should keep that up. @standupforscience.bsky.social

Today I attended the "Stand Up for Science" rally in Hartford. Pictured: cardboard sign with sections reading "Embrace a truth-seeking mindset | Strive for informed disagreement | DearNiece2024.com" and "Preserve public data | Fund research and education | Stand up for science | DearNephew2020.com"

Here is Alec from Technology Connections describing mass-market large language models as "the purest form of lazy anti-intellectualism." The analogy he draws between algorithmic curation and algorithmic text is imperfect but thought-provoking.

What I want for my birthday is to end Trumpist ideological interference in science, healthcare, and the basic nonpartisan functions of government (including, for example, the important work done at the FBI, the CDC, and the CFPB).

6/8. In science, and in institutions of learning like colleges and universities, there is a shared understanding that edicts should not go unquestioned—that we all have a duty to systematically investigate the world around us and to interrogate claims about it. We do not simply obey.

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

Our very minimal obligation as researchers is to stick to the evidence and insist on the truth. If a government says that "there are no trans kids" or "there's no prejudice against trans ppl", it's up to us to answer "No. You're either wrong or lying, and you're hurting ppl in the process".

According to some reports stemming from an internal CDC email, agency researchers have been ordered to change the text of manuscripts submitted for peer review to remove terms such as "gender" and "transgender." www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/... insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-n...

As criminals remove public data from government websites, I am grateful for the vital work of the Internet Archive, the ICPSR, and other data archives.

Statistical power often gets shoehorned into conversations where it is unhelpful. For example, reviewers sometimes ask about power when they already know the results of the experiment. This piece conveys some valuable reminders of why that rarely makes sense.

I'm just a small-town political scientist, but it seems like "one party is now so extreme that it is going to dismantle the modern state & all of its basic functions" should have been front page news during the last months & weeks of the 2024 election. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Forceful moral condemnation is not the best strategy for coaxing Trumpists out of their disastrous mindset. If you have the fortitude to hold that condemnation in mind while you speak as though you just want to understand their perspective, I commend you. But do not give up the condemnation itself.

In October, I wrote to my niece: "As you work to build a better world, I hope you will make at least one specific commitment: reject the incoherent epistemology of Trump's movement."

Throughout the coming wave of catastrophes, my most fervent hope is that we can limit the extent to which Trump's cultural movement achieves its primary goals: entrenching bigotry as a permanent norm and killing the expectation that people should think carefully.

Navigating the Nonsense and Propaganda of Clownish Authoritarianism   Ignoring what Trump says won’t work. Constant outrage is not a viable strategy either. We must find a more productive way to engage Trump’s dangerous outlandishness.   New piece:

1. Reproducibility is not a generally reliable indicator of particular issues in a field. The problem as we understand is to expect high levels of reproducibility unconditionally, regardless of the specifics of the scientific field. We need to calibrate our expectations.

When academics condemn Trumpism, high-minded folks sometimes accuse us of failing to truly understand the perspectives of serious Trump supporters. There is some truth there: it is very difficult to understand anyone else's perspective. But my condemnation does not stem from a failure of empathy.

The main challenge with information today is not finding it but rather evaluating its quality. Higher education can help people learn to vet sources and establish trust. Large language models, in contrast, disguise sources and undermine trust.

Four years ago, I wrote a letter to my then-2-year-old nephew about Donald Trump (not for now but for when he grows up). This year, I wrote a sequel for my 3-year-old niece. Both letters are public and corrections are welcome. dearniece2024.com

To conclude my two weeks of posting reruns from other social media platforms, I will call attention to my free educational resources about applied statistics, available at saraemilyburke.com/statistics.h... This thread showcases a handful of examples.

Suppose you've designed a study and found a "null" result, and you'd like to argue that you've found evidence against the phenomenon in question producing a large effect. Should you emphasize how statistically powerful your study was? Don't bother.

Why I love the logic of null hypothesis significance testing [thread]

All human subjects research in psychology should report the date range of data collection. We seem to have a consensus that some demographic description of the sample should be available to readers by default; the approximate historical context is similarly important.

Americans sometimes react dismissively toward both biracial people and bisexual people. Is this a coincidence, or is there something about being seen as "intermediate" that evokes a dismissive reaction? Article: doi.org/10.1111/jasp... Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Kate Weisburd and I have a new empirical paper out in the Northwestern University Law Review! We ask: what do ordinary Americans believe about how Miranda rights are invoked? t.co/fjpjlJ4vUY 1/4

Do laws give people hints about which social groups they should like or dislike? @rosesomm.bsky.social and I tackled this question in a 2022 paper: lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/...

Psychology attaches too much prestige and credibility to formalized theories. We need more patience for incremental advances in reasoning about phenomena. doi.org/10.1111/jasp...

As an introduction of sorts, over the next week or so I will share a few of my recent publications and then revisit a few posts I originally wrote for other social media platforms. (If you also follow me on Twitter or Mastodon, I apologize in advance for the repetition.)

I am still learning about how Bluesky works, but one of the features I'm excited about is the "Quiet Posters" feed. I have always wanted social media platforms to show me the only thing person X wrote this week before the fifth thing person Y wrote today.

Hello Bluesky! I am a social psychologist at Syracuse University. I think a lot about intergroup bias, statistics, and research methods, and these topics are primary in my research and teaching.

Oxford scientist resigns from Royal Society over Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship