The Super Bowl will spawn countless new fans Playing on the same team can bind people together in powerful ways--and winning makes everything better: Successful teams forge a shared identity, and connections between teammates reducing discrimination www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/rerun-the-...

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

The Europian Union argues TikTok's ‘Addictive Design’ features violate online safety laws A Pew poll found that 16% of teens were on TikTok “almost constantly.” The EU says TikTok poses potential harm to the “physical and mental well-being” of users, including minors www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

Collaborative groups often outperform single individuals in complex problem solving. A new paper examined how to create the right incentives to promote this kind of collective intelligence. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Across social media platforms, political posting is linked to affective polarization--extreme users post the most. As polarized partisans increasingly dominate the conversation, casual users disengage and the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more extreme. arxiv.org/html/2510.25...

After four months, the journal has not found a single reviewer for my PhD student's manuscript. The academic peer review system is broken. I think we all should: 1. Review three papers for every one that we submit. 2. Promptly declined to review a paper when the request arrives. #AcademicChatter

Across social media platforms, political posting is linked to affective polarization--extreme users post the most. As polarized partisans increasingly dominate the conversation, casual users disengage and the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more extreme. arxiv.org/html/2510.25...

People don't like individuals who vigilantly monitor and reprimand wrongdoings at work. These "hall monitors" are seen as less moral and hyper competitive (the only people who like them are other vigilantes). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Research finds that people overestimate how many social media users post harmful content--which makes us think the world is worse than it really is. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

“International House was my best experience while living in NYC, much better than my studies at Columbia University…” What kind of institution could provide a much better learning experience than one of the most prestigious universities in the world? www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/an-unexpec...

15% of publications in social psychology now include a reference to victimhood. This new paper explains how to foster reconciliation between groups by addressing the distinct identity needs of perpetrator (moral status) and victim (agency) groups. www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fu...

In a recent talk, I explained how our social identities shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions. I discuss how social identity can help us understand many challenges, including political conflict, misinformation, climate change, and threats to democracy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXHS...

Just as a quick note while we discuss all the new (and familiar) names in the Epstein files: be careful about saying "everyone knows" about prominent people who are predators. People new to the field, people less connected (often marginalized folks), people who are adjacent, etc. may not know.

Large language models can accurately score people’s Big 5 personality traits on the basis of their brief, open-ended narratives. LLM ratings converged with self-reports and predicted daily behaviour & mental health www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People strongly prefer to date someone who shares their politics (r=.62). Only 7.7% of couples are dating someone from the opposite political party (a Democrat dating a Republican). People who see their partners as politically dissimilar have worse relationships sites.lsa.umich.edu/whirl/wp-con...

Rationality (especially its analytic component) is consistently associated with both earnings and wage gaps across 101 occupations. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

i find it so weird they research moral cognition. reminds me a bit of Tania Singer and her research on empathy www.science.org/content/arti...

It's disturbing to see many of the the major figures in moral cognition all over the Epstein files He was friendly with a huge number of the leading figures in the field, including giving millions to their labs, long after he pled guilty to sexually abusing young girls www.justice.gov/epstein

Here’s Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely asking Jeffrey Epstein for “the name and email of the redhead that was here with you.” This is four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

every epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds

People who engage in altruism that benefits themselves are derogated. Why? Social rewards are treated as being reserved for costly prosocial actions. Claiming such rewards without incurring costs seems like cheating and thus deserves moral derogation journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Social identities shape our beliefs A new paper offers evidence for the Identity Model of Belief: randomly assigning people to groups lowers their threshold for believing information that aligns with their identity. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A growing body of evidence identifies political polarization as a risk factor adversely shaping public health outcomes. Our new paper explains how this relationship can be understood through theories of group processes and behavioral decision-making. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A growing body of evidence identifies political polarization as a risk factor adversely shaping public health outcomes. Our new paper explains how this relationship can be understood through theories of group processes and behavioral decision-making. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is an excellent piece. There is strong randomized controlled trial data supporting motivational interviewing as an intervention to reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccination rates. It makes sense to apply similar cognitive approaches and this paper nicely lays out how to do so.

Social conflict fosters cognitive distortions which, like those in clinical settings, lead to cycles of counterproductive behavior that feed into distorted thinking. A new paper uses insights from CBT to fix cognitive distortions that fuel intergroup conflict: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

The public tends to view AI as labor-replacing rather than labor-creating. And this perception erodes trust in democracy and political engagement with technology. This could be a major problem facing many countries as AI scales--if it replaces jobs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New study finds that emphasizing collective efficacy (people's ability to catalyze large-scale change) is very effective in catalyzing behavioural change. As you can see from my pinned post, I'm a big fan of simple messages that can mobilize public support for climate action!

I gave a talk on how AI can entrench (or overcome) intergroup bias at the Psych of Tech conference You can now watch the full talk here: youtu.be/XtIPjSrXAhM

The US lost 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields year, in institutes ranging from the National Institutes of Health to NASA. This is like a prefrontal lobotomy to society. The US government has drained their own brains. www.science.org/content/arti...

Is academia just a job? We assigned this paper in our professional development seminar last week and it was quite popular. My view: I grew up in a working class family and no one I knew considered their job "a calling". I also had a bunch of jobs that felt, well, like jobs.

This is an important paper on social class barriers among faculty in academia. First-generation college grads earn less and are placed at lower prestige institutions despite being just as productive as other faculty. Faculty from upper class backgrounds are overplaced for their research records.

Collaborative groups often outperform single individuals in complex problem solving. A new paper examined how to create the right incentives to promote this kind of collective intelligence. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5

Democracy doesn’t require perfect truth—but it does require something more fragile: independent voices. The “wisdom of crowds” depends on independence between judgments. If a single actor can speak through thousands of inauthentic accounts, the apparent consensus of the crowd stops being informative

I deleted all the social media apps from my phone The reason isn't because of mental well-being, but simply because they are wasting my life. The stat that did it for me is this one: the average person will spend 5 years of their life on social media. For young people it's 10 years. Yes, a decade!

Censorship comes to the University of Arkansas Little Rock: arktimes.com/arkansas-blo...

New post-doc position working with me in a new lab at @snfagora.bsky.social ! It's one year appointment, renewable for up to 5 years. The position includes data analysis and independent research, mentorship of lab members, and participation in SNF Agora Institute life. apply.interfolio.com/178796

Sycophantic AI chatbots made participants’ attitudes more extreme and increased their certainty in those attitudes. Interactions with disagreeable chatbots, on the other hand, reduced both attitude extremity and certainty. www.psypost.org/sycophantic-...

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Scientists who use AI published 3X more papers, received 5X times more citations, and reached leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers. But science as a whole is paying the price. AI-driven work circles the same crowded problems, are leads to a less interconnected scientific literature

Guest editors of special journal issues have been abusing their powers by publishing an excessive number of their own papers, according to a new study. This is "a blatant case of scientific misconduct" www.science.org/content/arti...

Ultimately, our findings suggest that without detailed information on specific procedures and scoring methods, results from the Iowa Gambling Task are essentially uninterpretable. For more info, check out our preprint 👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

As tens of thousands across America protest the violence that ICE sows with impunity, federal agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis today.

ICE terrorizes our cities. ICE puts us all in danger. Abolish ICE.

AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming for Democracy Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it’s virtually impossible to detect. Read about our paper here: www.wired.com/story/ai-pow...

Talking to others feels good. People predicted that trying to have a conversation would be unpleasant because they anticipated that others would be uninterested in talking. Yet, when they were assigned to talk to a stranger it was a pleasant experience. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34618536/

Malicious AI swarms threaten to darken the democratic sun.☀️ LLMs & autonomous agents can mimick human social dynamics & enable influence campaigns to consume all.🦗 Read our @science.org experts’ clarion call & let’s #FreeTheFuture🖖 — together! ▶️ doi.org/10.1126/scie...

AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach unprecedented scale and precision. Our new paper in Science explains how a disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Led by @daniel-thilo.bsky.social & @kunstjonas.bsky.social

Making tests option is a bad idea. New research finds that "test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds" www.nber.org/papers/w33389

AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach unprecedented scale and precision. Our new paper in Science explains how a disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Led by @daniel-thilo.bsky.social & @kunstjonas.bsky.social