New write-up of our political scandal experiments for SPSP's (@spspnews.bsky.social) blog. We find that partisan voters allow politicians to get away with hostile, defensive "explanations" for scandal, esp when the politician is high-status and when party goals are at stake spsp.org/news/charact...

Agree that these are important and sobering findings for Political Scientists who aspire to a job at 1 of 122 PhD granting political science departments. This does *not*, however, mean that you won't get a good job if you don't go to a "top 20" program. (1/3)

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

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13% Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006) The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%). academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

On election day, I wanna announce that I am recruiting social psych PhD students for my lab at UIC. My lab focuses on racial identities (esp Asian, Latino, MENA Americans) and intra-minority conflict/ coalition. So please tell your students to pick me! All details on my website: www.pbandjlab.com

What “error” has had the most positive consequences for your field this century? I’ll start: The editorial decision to accept Bem’s precognition paper at JPSP.

We read the (in)famous Bem Feeling the Future JPSP paper for a "spooky" Halloween lab meeting and it was fabulous!! I couldn't get over the wild methodological issue where they type of psychic power he founded depended on what random number generator Bem used 😂

"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."

Good threads. We used SESOIs pretty extensively in our recent registered reports (e.g. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...). We found plenty of "significant" effects, but ones that were smaller than our SESOI. 1/4

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” Willful ignorance is also motivated by social identity concerns--it is driven by ingroup favoritism + outgroup derogation and fuels conspiracy belies. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Why do young kids try to climb into tiny toy cars? Remembering Judy DeLoache’s work on how babies learn to understand symbols and symbolic representation 💙 youtu.be/PK_BQjVHZ00?...

Yikes yikes yikes

A massive study on the effects of social class tested 35 hypotheses in 4 countries (N = 33,536) Only 50% of findings replicated Hypotheses based on differences between social class contexts in terms of constraints, uncertainty & status were supported: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heartbroken to share that Judy DeLoache passed away yesterday. She was a brilliant scientist and a fantastic role model. I met her 10+ years ago as a grad student @uvapsychology.bsky.social. She believed in me at my lowest and inspired me to persevere through the challenges of grad school + life.

Public health is under attack by a deluge of misinformation. We offer a consensus report from the American Psychological Association summarizing what we know & what interventions are effective in countering it. We provide 8 concrete recommendations. Open-access - awspntest.apa.org/fulltext/202...

it's funny to see things like this every day, reflexively ask yourself "where is the limit," remember that "there are no limits" but then have your inner institutionalist say "but imagine if one day we do reach a limit lol"

New editorial from me and @keithschnak.bsky.social. “Why Washington University must not sign Trump's 'compact'”

Looks like an important new working paper. The wave of anti-DEI laws since 2021 has had real effects on hiring at public colleges. ungated: osf.io/preprints/so...

This preprint reports on a project with @j-rock.bsky.social. We merged a light touch intervention (typical of survey experiments) w/ an intensive intervention (more typical of practitioner efforts) for reducing toxic polarization to see if we could cheaply boost 🚀 the more intensive intervention

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch #PsychSciSky Our new paper out in American Psychologist. Led by Meleady, with @debshulman.bsky.social, Kotzur, & Crisp. Contact "ruptures" (going to university; studying abroad) ==> changes in outgroup attitudes longitudinally psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Current tally of American social psychologists at SESP in Lisbon saying "here" to refer to the USA: 2 😂

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This. (The entire article is required reading, but I especially appreciate this section)

When the Founding Fathers adopted the First Amendment, the censorship that kept them up at night was censorship or private citizens by the government. That's what they made unconstitutional. Not social pressure. Not social media pile-ons. Not hate speech. Censorship by the government.

Announcing SPSP's 2026 Self & Identity precon (bit.ly/4mn2WDT), which will have a timely focus on activist and ally identities. We have a phenomenal set of speakers (Linda Tropp! Kim Rios! Lucy De Souza! Teri Kirby! Dan McAdams!) and are accepting data blitz and poster submissions until Oct 23!

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

White House Officials Vow Vast Crackdown on Liberal Groups www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09... Open authoritarianism. Happening right in front of us.

Breaking a hiatus to post this. A group of Israeli Social Psychologists, myself included, wrote a letter to speak out clearly against the Israeli government’s decisions and the resulting devastation in Gaza. docs.google.com/document/d/1... In hopes of peace and safety for all, and soon

🚨 TT job alert! 🚨 The University of Florida is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology; open to ALL AREAS within social psych. Review begins 10/10. Job ad here: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53... I'm co-chair of the search committee and happy to answer questions! 🧵

So uhh..I made a mixtape 🎶. If you're obsessed with KPop Demon Hunters (like I am) but don't know much about KPop outside of the movie, I put together a 3.5h playlist that matches the flow of the film. 👇 open.spotify.com/playlist/5SN... #KPopDemonHunters #Rumi #Mira #Zoey #SajaBoys #Huntrix

Princeton is running its Presidential Postdoctoral Program again this year. If you are interested in applying to work with me, please reach out by October 10 so that I can consider all interested applicants and support a candidate for my lab this year. dof.princeton.edu/faculty-deve...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The @cahbir.bsky.social and @rutgersbhi.bsky.social are hiring! Multiple open area and open rank faculty jobs, wonderful colleagues, amazing resources, and one of the largest communities of brain science research groups on the planet. Please apply and share widely. jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/209...

In a new paper we show how misinformation derails support for public action on climate change by casting doubt on the scientific consensus (which undermines public opinion). Disinformers attack expert consensus because they know it works. Free: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

As the spouse of a native New Yorker, I have to preface this with a disclaimer that New Jersey is the armpit of America and so on and so forth, but seriously, this looks like an amazing opportunity and an amazing department in an amazing location with amazing colleagues

You forgot the best part is to be your colleague!!! A dream to work alongside Calvin ❤️

🚨We're hiring!🚨 The Dept of Psychology at Rutgers is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology. Review of applications begin on Oct 18. Details here: jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/259... I'm chairing the search committee and am happy to field questions about the position. 🧵

New article on the potential contribution of experimental demand artifacts to evaluative conditioning effects now published OA in SPPC: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

Newly accepted in PSPB! We examined whether Asian and Black Americans perceived one another through a zero-sum lens. Inspired by the SCOTUS affirmative action decisions, I wanted to know if Asians thought they were losing to Black people and how this mindset affects coalition osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint by @elliotgould.bsky.social and colleagues introduces “adaptive preregistration." Adaptive preregistration comprises two key components: registered flexibility and interim preregistrations. doi.org/10.32942/X2G...

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

My new PLOS Bio piece about when one's work is misrepresented: "[T]here is a normative expectation within scholarly research that all parties are well-intentioned and truth-seeking...when invitations to engage genuinely are not accepted..scholarly discourse is ill-equipped to resolve the conflict."

🧪 Translation for NSF folks: Yesterday's SCOTUS decision will likely soon result in these previously blocked actions: -elimination of NSF divisions as an org unit -closing Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, firing its staff Can still be challenged in court (see below). But still 🤯🤯🤯

1/3. Back in January we (@commhsp.bsky.social) shared some data on how the national conversation about racial equity changed from 2020 to the beginning of 2025. We now have an update, with more data extending through the end of April. commhsp.org/an-update-on...

Reminded me of Epstein (1983) on aggregation and the prediction of behaviour psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-...

That moment when you had completely forgotten about a cool data app you’d made, only to find others posting about it ;) Thanks @calvinklai.bsky.social!

I love this technique because it gives a cool way to isolate change and stability components of within-person measurement using latent variables. The stable portion of IATs is far more predictive of other individual-difference measures than one would think given traditional scoring/analyses