This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...

Just back from an incredible two days at the NYU CESS Experimental Political Science conference! 🎓 Happy to share that my poster, "Do Wartime Casualties Affect Support for the Autocrat? Evidence from Russia," won the Rebecca Morton Poster Prize !

Now posted ahead of print: "Conceptualizing Academic Freedom," forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science. (Uncorrected proofs, so a few minor edits different from the version that will be published in June.) doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6

Forthcoming in the AER: "Social Preferences over Ordinal Outcomes" by Sandro Ambuehl and B. Douglas Bernheim.

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨 We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

As a TA in the US, I recognize this so much. Students often feel “effort = A,” but grades are supposed to reflect expertise and outcomes. I keep wondering: what would it take to make academic work the primary signal of achievement again—above extracurriculars, sports, and everything else?

First instalment of my substack primer on right-wing populism in Europe is out. jacobedenhofer.substack.com/p/explaining...

Niedenthal and Wohltjen review the varied emotional and personality adaptations to historical heterogeneity, synthesizing evidence from multiple fields www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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 🧵

🚨 Why do people protest against authoritarian regimes even when facing extreme danger? 🚨 In our new paper on Romania's 1989 Revolution, we find that communities exposed to the communist Gulag showed 5x higher dissent levels. doi.org/10.1177/0010... 1/🧵

Is unconscious bias real? @davidamodio.bsky.social points out critiques (people are aware of “implicit bias”) rely on semantics. In experiments, people have biased priors, which leads to biased “learning” (noticing stereotype-consistent info)…and. They aren’t aware and can’t suppress it. #PMIG2025

Joel Mokyr just won the Nobel — what full-circle moment for me! Back in 2018–19, my sophomore thesis on the political economy of innovation (published in 2020) cited him twice. I may study other things now, but I’m still a Mokyr reader at heart. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📊Working Paper No. 7: “What Drives Refugees’ Return After Conflict?” Survey of 2,500+ Ukrainian refugees across 30 European countries: territorial integrity and security guarantees are key to return. Read: econ4ua.org/wp-content/u... Submit research: lnkd.in/gf2nQ5WC

Just finished reading this *excellent* article by Gabriel et al. which discusses which effects can be identified in randomized controlled trials. With DAGs!> link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Call for abstracts for interdisciplinary conference on "Popular Support for Autocratic Regimes in Historical Perspective," May 26-27 in Toulouse @tse-fr.eu Deadline: Nov 15. Travel/accommodation will be covered. Please apply! Co-organized with Jan Stuckatz, Selina Hofstetter, and Mikkel Dack.

Tonight I had my very first lecture by a Nobel laureate — Claudia Goldin (‘67) at Cornell. Back when I thought of becoming an economic historian, her work was among the most important I read. And her famous blind auditions experimental study inspired my own interest in experiments.

To borrow another example, taken from the `dbreg` README: github.com/grantmcdermo... Here I am running a fixed-effects regression on 180 million(!) row parquet dataset... and it completes **< 2 seconds**... on my laptop 🤯 This is powered by @duckdb.org under the hood. #rstats #econsky

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

James Tilley & Sara Hobolt's newest publication finds that narcissistic personalities fuel affective polarization in the UK. Narcissism predicts both loyalty to in-groups and hostility to out-groups, deepening political divides. #AffectivePolarization Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Had a great time at my first #PolMeth conference! Grateful for the chance to visit Emory and Atlanta, meet brilliant folks, and share some work-in-progress “Using AI to Explain Classifiers: A Framework and Application to Text-Based Experimental Outcomes.”

Bsky has a thread composer now. To celebrate, here is a thread about our recent paper on antiwar attitudes and actions in Russia. In August 2022, we asked ~1000 Russians about their feelings regarding the war in Ukraine and whether they did or planned to do anything to oppose it. #polpsy #socialpsyc

Photo evidence that #EPSA2025 went more than well! Thanks to Madrid and to @epssnet.bsky.social

Our Element is out! 🎉 Why do authoritarian-leaning leaders target women’s and LGBTQ+ rights? Is there a systematic pattern that reaches beyond individual country cases, and how is this reflected in people’s attitudes and societal norms? www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Vincent Ostrom argued that both the Soviet Union & the American state masked imperialist dynamics with rhetoric of freedom. Moreover, he argued against relying on notions of state sovereignty, arguing that instead we should build relations of self-governance.

I'm revising my undergraduate module on 'Psychology of Crowd Behaviour', including a new topic on 'Crowds & Leadership'. The new reading list includes the following. Essential reading: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New study by @matthewcebul.bsky.social & J. Pinckney asks “How do nonviolent alternatives affect international support for violent rebel groups?” Surveys across 30+ countries find “alternative resistance options consistently reduce support for armed rebellion…” journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🎉 Thrilled to be at my first EPSA in beautiful Madrid —and to be busy in the best way! I’ll be: 🔹 Chairing and presenting at the panel "PUBOPI – Personality and Emotions" 🗓️ Sat, 28 June | ⏰ 09:30–11:10 | 📍 Room 1A.13

100% yes, at least as long as Europe will not normalize having ACs

Want to add an LLM chatbot to your Qualtrics surveys? Here's a step-by-step guide showing exactly how to do this with AWS Bedrock joshuakalla.github.io/llm_persuasi...

From a political psychology perspective, what astonishes me about U.S. political culture is how deeply allergic people across the spectrum are to engaging with positions — and facts — that challenge their political imagination.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Attn: the special issue of SMR on Generative AI in Sociology is now online. The whole issue is fire, but the introduction by @thomasdavidson.bsky.social and Danny Karell is a must read, covering prompting, measurement, and simulations. It's a road map for soc sci research in the genAI era. +

Effective non-democracies, for sure, challenge democratic legitimacy. While effective public services provision isn’t inherently a feature of democracy, democracies historically held an edge here—and that success helped people embrace and internalize democratic values.

À mes contacts francophones sur Bluesky: Quelqu’un aurait-il un moyen plus direct de contacter la rédaction du Monde (@lemonde-en.bsky.social) que l’adresse mail officielle? J’ai une question sur les données utilisées dans cette enquête, pour un projet de recherche. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

I think it’s the perfect time for European, Canadian, and Mexican universities to establish systematic programs allowing international undergraduates from the US to finish the degree. As for PhD students, I’d like to see more visiting positions with a minimal stipend sufficient for survival.

In this research note, Kit Rickard (@ethzurich.bsky.social), @critgeopolitics.bsky.social, @kristinmbakke.bsky.social and John O'Loughlin (@colorado.edu) highlight the pitfalls of wartime polling, drawing on lessons from panel surveys in Ukraine before and after Russia's 2022 invasion.

I’ve open‑sourced all content from my talk Retrieving  &  Generating Data with LLMs in Python on my Github, along with slides. 🔓 10 Jupyter notebooks that show how to turn messy text into clean, structured data, all with GPT‑4o‑mini & the OpenAI API. Details on applications below🧵

A study of 22 rural communities in Poland looks at how female friendships influence women’s decisions about how many children to have. Educated women with more emotionally supportive friends outside their kin networks have fewer children. In PNAS Nexus: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Nice piece on our article on affective polarisation and the dark personality of leaders, w @kgattermann.bsky.social @fredericofs.bsky.social Diego Garzia, Loes Aaldering TLDR: dark traits of in-party leaders associated with higher affective polarisation in their (closest) followers

Today, I received a termination for my National Science Foundation CAREER Grant, which employed a post-doc and many undergraduate research assistants.

Are there people here who transitioned to using Julia after working with STATA or R? If so, what has your experience been like? I understand that Julia isn’t yet a full-fledged replacement for STATA or R, but have you found specific types of tasks where Julia provides significant marginal utility?

These turbulent times make it hard to stay productive - especially while TAing, taking classes, and preparing for my qualifying exam. So much stress that I barely noticed this week I submitted two papers to journals. It’s rare to feel proud and grateful to myself. I need to remember this feeling.

We are excited to release the OpenThinker2 reasoning models and data: 1. Outperforms DeepSeekR1-32B in reasoning. 2. Fully open source, open weights and open data (1M samples). 3. Post-trained only with SFT. RL post-training will likely further improve performance. github.com/open-thought...

This slide deck from @yiqingxu.bsky.social and co-authors on issues with TWFE in Political Science based on their large re-analysis study that's conditionally accepted in APSR is really great. Key takeaways below. yiqingxu.org/papers/engli...

Your map’s legend can be turned into a histogram, helping your audience understand the distribution in addition to decoding the colours.

Parallelization just landed in the dev version of purrr: purrr.tidyverse.org/dev/referenc... Really pleased that the mirai framework makes this possible. Huge credit to the tidyverse maintainers @hadley.nz @lionelhenry.bsky.social and @davisvaughan.bsky.social ! #rstats #tidyverse

A new working paper with Daniel Banki, @urisohn.bsky.social and Robert Walatka, just submitted to SSRN. The paper is comment on Ryan Oprea's recent AER paper. The paper is processing, but you, my friends, get early entry. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....