What if you find out your own brother is a thief? We asked how people respond when a close other commits a moral transgression. -> It gets people to feel both as the victim + as the perpetrator & changes what punishment they seek. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky

Large, cross-cultural study (n > 6k, 25 nations) on international prosociality finds that - ingroup favoritism is widespread - more similarities between two nations = more prosociality - people from rich nations give more to people from poor nations doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

"P-Hacking with one prompt" by Shigeto Kawahara. TL/DR: Ask LLMs to find a significant effect, and they will oblige. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Did Trump’s 2024 re-election make it okay to be openly prejudiced? New work from @chriscrandall.bsky.social suggests it did. The more negatively Trump spoke about a group, the more okay it became to express prejudice (and the more prejudiced people were) towards that group after the election.

Check out this very interesting tool from Giving What We Can that relies on our data!

Our recent paper discussing why children might care more about animals. A joy to write with @lmcguire.bsky.social @nadirafaber.bsky.social Jared Piazza and Katja Liebal. academic.oup.com/cdpers/advan...

If you're interested in a quick overview of why children might care more about other animals than adults do, take a look (w. @nadirafaber.bsky.social, @mattiwilks.bsky.social, Katja Liebal and Jared Piazza) - doi.org/10.1093/cdpe...

'The nation is divided.' How an ancient evolutionary bond between street dogs and humans has become a modern urban crisis in India. Read more from @biology.ox.ac.uk’s Dr Nishant Kumar ⬇️

“We requested information about the case to at least protect attendees of our future events and potentially act against Hewstone, however, Oxford University never provided any information.” Open Access: archive.is/ue5k8#select... Paywall: www.thetimes.com/uk/education... #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky

German law professor Werner Schroeder is suing his government after police forcibly checked his ID at the Austrian-German border. He argues these controls violate EU law and undermine the Schengen system of borderless travel.

podcasts

Why do real research with real people when you can just use our stereotype generator?

This is organized fraud, it's not accidental. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

More than half of researchers now use AI for peer review — often against guidance www.nature.com/articles/d41... #AcademicSky #PsychSciSky

Proud of this new piece 🚨 in @NatMachIntell, with S. Porsdam Mann, @JulianJKoplin & @HaotianYuan0630 - who is still in high school! ➡️ "LLMs in Scholarly Writing Pose a Provenance Problem" - when LLM's 'fill in the gaps' in your thinking with another's uncredited ideas. Preview/link ⬇️.

Here are the books I read this year that clarified and magnified my life, that will stay with me for the rest of it — from art and philosophy to memoirs and children's books www.themarginalian.org/2025/12/13/b...

1/3 Self-awareness prior to the mirror test. It has been three days since this fish passed the mirror test in Masanori Kohda's laboratory in Osaka. It is now experimenting with reflections, grabbing and lifting pieces of shrimp before watching closely as they fall into the mirror.

New experimental paper on intuitions about whether people have obligations *to themselves* From philosopher Laura Soter (@laurasoter.bsky.social) in JPSP psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

🚨 Call for abstracts 🚨 Join our EASP pre-conference on 'Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior: Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Methods' on June 30, 2026. We invite flash talk submissions from researchers at all career stages. 📝 Deadline: January 5 2026 🔗 More info: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Best MRI demo I’ve ever seen. Accurate. (Sound on).

"How defence rhetoric escalates untergroup conflict" spkl.io/63325AbcXh Luuk Snijder, Jorg Gross, & @dedreu.bsky.social @cp-iscience.bsky.social

How do some children learn to eat some animals while continuing to care for others? New research suggests that this is caused by resolving the conflict between moral values and human cultural practices. Read more in #SPPS: https://ow.ly/81NL50XHCS7

Children love animals. How do they turn into meat-eating adults? We investigate how children trade off their moral values with the importance of food for human traditions. The great Alex Carter's first PhD paper now out in SPPS: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #socialpsyc #devpsy #philsky

🚨New research in SPPS: Call a dish plant-based meat and people think it will taste worse + looks “less manly.” Sexist beliefs made this even stronger. Results of nearly 1400 meat eaters across 2 studies w/ Salmen, @nadirafaber.bsky.social & Krings Open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Children love animals. How do they turn into meat-eating adults? We investigate how children trade off their moral values with the importance of food for human traditions. The great Alex Carter's first PhD paper now out in SPPS: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #socialpsyc #devpsy #philsky

Why do people oppose plant-based alternatives to meat? We find it has a lot to do with a symbolic association between meat & masculinity. And with sexism. Open access in SPPS with A. Salmen, V. Krings, & @kristofdhontphd.bsky.social #socialpsyc journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The consultation is open to all. It takes around 15–20 minutes, and every response will help to shape future EU law. Please take part! #AnimalWelfare

Why do people oppose plant-based alternatives to meat? We find it has a lot to do with a symbolic association between meat & masculinity. And with sexism. Open access in SPPS with A. Salmen, V. Krings, & @kristofdhontphd.bsky.social #socialpsyc journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🧵1/4 New paper alert! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Can you celebrate diversity while undermining it? Our new paper in American Psychologist discusses how people/organizations can appear committed to diversity while their conceptualizations of diversity actively undercut it.

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Diederik Stapel was a massive watershed moment in psychology. However, he was -- and let's be slightly glib here -- some guy from The Netherlands who wrote social psychology papers. The full accounting of the Eysenck case is approx, at minimum, TWO STAPELS. retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/n...

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

A diverse range of mammals once roamed the planet. This changed dramatically with the arrival of humans, who have become the dominant species through our own population, as well as the animals we breed and raise for food. What is the distribution of the global mammal kingdom today?

This is such a cool study. A parasitic ant queen tricks worker ants into murdering their own queen, so the parasite can take over the colony.

So, is "When Prophesy Fails"—the foundation of cognitive dissonance theory—debunked? Unclear. The article making this claim is... odd. It describes Festinger and Schachter as leftwing radicals, critiques the political slant of their funding, generally refers to their work as failed... 1/n

Google defaulting all Gmail users to a setting that enables Google to harvest all your emails into chatbot training is straight-up evil and invasive. www.huffpost.com/entry/opt-ou...

#AcademicSky Women deserve to study and work in safe places. Period. Let's hope that men in academia start doing more to make this a reality, structurally It's not enough to refrain from personally harassing; we need to change the norms Be an anti-harasser, visibly, not simply a non-harasser

This—on my former university, department, and advisor—is harrowing but required reading for all social psychologists. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

In our new paper (open access in PSPB), we asked where children’s greater moral concern for animals stems from. We find that children place less moral weight on species membership alone (i.e. are less speciesist) than adults. #socialpsyc #devpsy #philsky journals.sagepub.com/eprint/ZMRUM...

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣 "The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct" Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

Are victimhood claims in political party manifestos and election programs on the rise? Yes, they are! Check out a brand new paper authored by @marlenevoit.bsky.social , @lucaskohler.bsky.social et al. -- published yesterday in @polpsyispp.bsky.social. Open Access: doi.org/10.1111/pops....

Dorsilla Anono Katimbwa, an expert in Metabolism, Biochemistry, and Genetics of Microorganisms, encourages other Kenyan women in science to believe in themselves—and to apply for the Humboldt Research Fellowship as well. Learn more about the programme here 👉 bit.ly/3Jhi7kU

🎉 Giving Multiplier turns 5! We launched in 2020 as a proof of concept — could we apply behavioral science to help people increase their charitable impact? “We would have been happy if we raised a little bit better than bake sale," said co-founder Prof. Joshua Greene. 1/2

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

🙂🧠 "At the within-person level, declines in life satisfaction predicted subsequent declines in cognitive function, and vice versa." (n > 60,000 from multiple countries) doi.org/10.1037/pspp...