striking that so many cities are seeing parallel homicide declines this year. i have no good explanation jasher.substack.com/p/the-fbi-wi...

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix. I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

"We therefore encourage policymakers to consider designing interventions to maximize reductions in absolute poverty rather than focusing on inequality per se."

Beyond Valence: Arousal as a Core Dimension of Affective Polarization: https://osf.io/5dfbj

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence 1/

Problems with the so-called gender equality paradox statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/25/p...

@brendannyhan.bsky.social is right: young people are reluctant to come to the defense of institutions that have excluded them, ignored them, and crushed their movements www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o...

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025. US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom. open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment...The three factors...are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes..."

New paper building a theory of stereotype negotiation. How people don't just let stereotypes happen to them; instead they constantly and actively navigate social impressions and others' evaluations by @cydneydupree.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We spent a year investigating billionaires for @washingtonpost.com. We found: the wealthiest 100 Americans gave $1.1 billion to influence the 2024 elections — 140x more than they did in 2000. And almost all of that giving boosted Republicans. washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

Very interesting set of studies about how agreement with punished acts undermines the perceived legitimacy of the punisher. Reminds me a bit of the Mullen & Nadler (2008) study that found that people were more likely to steal a borrowed pen from the researcher after being exposed to an unjust law.

Stoked to share this paper with @tagerai.bsky.social in PSPB! What happens when you see punishers punish others for acts you see as moral? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

"I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

My wife was sexually harassed by Miles Hewstone as a phd student. He was still asked to review her (and other women he harassed) for jobs and promotions. This is so fucked up. Thankfully, she and many other women testified against him and something was finally done. This is her take on his case:

Checkout @tagerai.bsky.social's awesome thread on our recent paper!

Our "Historical Psychology" special issue is now out in CRESP! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Co-edited with @mohammadatari.bsky.social and featuring historical perspectives on love, racial identity, emotion expression, well-being, collectivism, religion, and more! Brief 🧵

I'm struck by this clip of former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz saying Holocaust education has backfired in part because people Palestinians as victims: "They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people." www.reddit.com/r/JewsOfCons...

Just so that we're on the same page: This paper tells us what is *possible* not what is *true* This is definitely a concern, but (FWIW) I am highly skeptical that typical survey respondents have the technical skills (let alone the inclination) to do all of this.

This is an important paper at @apsrjournal.bsky.social. It's not exactly surprising that racism undermines effective representation, but it is well and carefully done. Congrats to @markarianga.bsky.social, @jacobhacker.bsky.social, @maclockhart.bsky.social, and Hajnal doi.org/10.1017/S000...

In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Dee & Pyne find that having mental-health first responders accompany police on certain emergency calls reduces the number of individuals placed in involuntary psychiatric detentions. #MentalHealth, #Law, #Police, #Reform

Lots of discussion of the cross-sectional, retrospective survey showing evidence for metaphysical belief change after psychedelic experiences... (picture on left) But few know of the better quality prospective longitudinal study showing NO evidence for belief change! (picture on right)

Those claiming Dems should retreat on racial justice aren't hard-headed realists, they're pushing against the electoral tide rather than leaning into it. The story of Gen Z isn't about racist backlash or red-pilled young men. It's the most racially progressive generation in American history. 🧵

Americans are growing more socially isolated and politically divided. Our new paper in Applied Network Science suggests these two forms of disconnection may be linked. People with denser, more connected social networks often feel less partisan animosity. 🧵

How do we succeed at self-control? In a new paper in @pnas.org with James Wilson, David Kalkstein, and Melissa Ferguson, we use mouse-tracking of ~47,000 decisions of long-term over short-term to show that 'willpower' is too narrow a conception of self-control www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

I'm back! In this experiment we had 39 participants choose between 8 different PhD programs which varied in terms of region, application materials, prestige, and fees. Importantly, two of the programs had a GRE requirement and two were equivalent but did not:

✨New preprint! Why do people express outrage online? In 4 studies we develop a taxonomy of online outrage motives, test what motives people report, what they infer for in- vs. out-partisans, and how motive inferences shape downstream intergroup consequences. Led by @felix-chenwei.bsky.social 🧵👇

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Excited to share our new paper with @swaziadam.bsky.social and colleagues! We examined how a quarter-long climate crisis course affected students’ real-world collective action behavior. epo.publia.org/epo/article/...

Remember when we had actual competitive Senate elections in most states? Remember when candidates actually mattered? People: The moderation debate is missing the big picture! We're in the era of nothing but D v R matters. And other things should matter. leedrutman.substack.com/p/the-modera...

Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Whoa. Chicago mayor calls for a general strike; now we're talking www.huffpost.com/entry/chicag...

Really excited to share this new piece with @tagerai.bsky.social, out now in @newscientist.com! It’s about our recent research showing how incentivizing punishment can break down cooperation

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Hammam, & Chris Shay) has a new piece, whose title speaks for itself. A 🧵 with some key descriptive takeaways:

Palestine’s most popular leader, Marwan Barghouti, was beaten unconscious and has his ribs broken by Israeli prison guards and his family fears for his life, his son has said, citing evidence given by former Palestinian detainees released this week as part of the ceasefire deal.

Why do we derogate effective altruists, activists, & other radically prosocial individuals? In new work, we discuss how doing good that deviates from social norms gets stigmatized. New preprint w/ @dcameron.bsky.social @tlau.bsky.social @desmond-ong.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Need some RAND game theorists to weigh in on how this effectively protests while also being impossible to show on fox news as a war zone.

This video of Chicagoans intervening to save a man from being abducted off the streets by ICE is making the rounds on Instagram. Community action works. Source: www.instagram.com/reel/DPZL2AL...

Strongly recommend Eitan Hersh's book on the problems with political hobbyism and what a better path looks like www.amazon.com/Politics-Pow...

I didn’t expect my first interview with the @nytimes.com to be from my 4-day old child’s pediatrician’s appointment! “Singular acts of violence, when they serve a particular narrative, are being spun into a tale of persecution,” Pasek said. “And that is where things feel dangerous to me.”

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

Pretty incredible own goal by liberal institutions and many Democratic electeds to crush the exact type of protests in 2024 that would’ve been the most effective way to slow or stop ICE incursions into American cities in 2025

Anyway here are some top comments on Ezra’s YouTube channel. I think they’re great examples of substantive discussion

"Movements that abandon core supporters in pursuit of mythical moderate voters often end up with neither. Energy drains away, activists stay home, and the authentic moral voice gets replaced by calculated positioning that convinces no one." data4democracy.substack.com/p/you-cant-e...

We propose that the everyday psychology of rules and 3rd party punishment is at the core of authoritarianism Our view posits no new constructs, is ideology-agnostic, & considers relevant only interactions w the state See our new working paper "Authoritarianism in Action" osf.io/preprints/ps...

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/...

I mean, we are living in two different realities now, and this really hasn't always been the case.