🚨New Working Paper!🚨 How do Americans mentally map political coalitions? We often talk as if U.S. politics is just two sorted camps. But when people think about which groups go with which, the picture is more complicated. 🧵👇

🚨New WP: Can an AI voter guide (grounded in information from a nonpartisan, fact-checked source) help voters’ decision making? 🚨 We built and evaluated an LLM-based chatbot that provided voting info in CA & TX (N=2,474) right before the 2024 election. 🧵👇

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Last day of #SANS2026! Today, @rachaelkee.bsky.social will present her poster introducing Inoxity. It’s an open source iOS app that allows for high-throughput collection of EMA and bio-behavioral data. What can you do with high-throughput data? Check her preprint! doi.org/10.33767/osf...

We’re excited to share that @nibasaleem.bsky.social was featured by @spspnews.bsky.social for her research informing policy at federal, social media platform and nonprofit levels! 🏛️💻💬 Read more here: spsp.org/news/newslet... #spsp #commsky #psychsky

New in HCR: Zhu et al. (2026) find that larger choice sets increased overall and cross-cutting news selection. Choice set composition shaped cross-cutting exposure, but attitudes and behavioral intentions did not significantly change in the short term. Read: doi.org/10.1093/hcr/...

New paper out in JPSP with @erichehman.bsky.social! We asked: What is the framework underlying our impressions of environments? Our large bottom-up study shows that people pay attention to 4 factors. We’re calling it the Environment Impressions Model: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

My lab @mediamosaiclab.bsky.social started research on the communication processes involved in intergroup contact and it does makes sense with more intergroup communication (if any) taking place digitally rather than face-to-face, especially for divisive contexts.

This paper claims that watching sports causes zero-sum thinking, with experimental and longitudinal evidence psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Winning a National Science Foundation grant for further exploration, UCSB researchers have found a person’s ideological position in favor of a protest action will often be at odds with the same action carried out by those who align with opposing ideological orientations 🪧 https://ow.ly/JATF50YocEP

@nature.com has published three groundbreaking papers on reproducibility, analytical robustness, and replicability across the social sciences. Sincere thanks are due to the many folks who contributed to these projects. It’s painstaking work, and a great service to social science.

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

After a decade since conceptualizing it, our paper on goal communication is finally out! 🎉 doi.org/10.1007/s110... We often talk about our goals with our family, friends or colleagues. We tell them what we’ve been up to, celebrate successes or vent about frustrations. (1/3) 🧵

A new paper in Science measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models. The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interesting new bot-detection strategy in online samples: academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

Apply for NCA Division awards by March 25! Mass Comm Division (for which I am the VP) has three awards, Teaching Award, Service Award, and Dissertation Award. Consider nominating yourself or others who are eligible! #NCA2026 www.natcom.org/2026-interes...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality of others living in the country as bad than good. Canada is on the opposiite end of the spectrum--they overwhelmingly see their neighbors as morally good pewrsr.ch/4ubNwaM

If you’re at #SRNT2026 this week, do stop by @qiyaopeng.bsky.social research talk! Her team used machine learning approaches to find the optimal profile of textual-visual messages in anti-vaping PSAs for young adults 🤖📰

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Postdoc! 🚨🚨 Postdoc opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026). We study identity, group dynamics, language, & politics. Rolling review begins 3/14 Apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15806 Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇

Postdoc position! Myself and @jordanaxt.bsky.social are seeking applications for a shared post-doctoral researcher at McGill, beginning Fall 2026. Topic area broadly centered on intergroup dynamics, prejudice, discrimination Full description here: hehmanlab.org/ad 1/2

📰Research we did in Singapore and US was featured in the Berkeley's Greater Good Magazine! #NUS #UCSB #wellbeing #selfcontrol

G’Morning #COMMSky! It’s Day 2 of #NCA2025! ⛰️ Today we’re excited to share a top paper, and present on pedagogy and mentorship! 🔝📄🏅 It was great meeting many of you yesterday—let’s keep it rolling! If you’re at #NCA25, stop by and say hi! 👋🏽 #AcademicSky #SciComm #UCSB See our Friday schedule ⬇️

🚨 #COMMSky Spotlight Alert! 🚨 @nibasaleem.bsky.social is featured in the November 2025 edition of the #ICA (@icahdq.bsky.social) Newsletter! 🌟 Check out the member spotlight at the 🔗 below. We’re proud to see our PI's research focus and mentorship aspirations highlighted on the global stage! 🌎

Check out these amazing mentoring events organized by the Mentoring and Leadership Council at #NCA2025! Hope to see you there!

Are you headed to #NCA2025 this week? 🤔 If so, come see what the Media MOSAIC Lab is sharing this year. We’ve got a full lineup of presentations, mentoring events, and top paper awards! 🗣️📄🏆 See our full lab schedule in the 🧵⬇️, and come connect with us at NCA! #COMMSky #AcademicSky #SciComm #UCSB

🚨New Paper 🚨 There is no shortage of interventions to address self-control in education or employee performance. Yet, they rarely address the core problem of whether individuals have the capacity to exert self-control (e.g., poor financial well-being; challenging life events). (1/3)

Honored to share that I’ve been awarded the NUS-Overseas Graduate Scholarship to support my doctoral studies on the media, social identity and intergroup relations! (1/2)

📢If you're joining the APS Global Summit this week, do visit some of my awesome students' posters! #APSGlobal #commsky #psychology

Check out the newest pub from @mediamosaiclab.bsky.social solo authored by our amazing @len-s.bsky.social who is also on the job market this year!! She proposes a framework for how media content strategically be used for intergroup socialization within families. #commsky

Exciting mixed-methods HCI work from my department! @overbye.bsky.social @garciaerick.bsky.social Xinyi Zhang & @laurentwang.bsky.social 🤖💻 #commsky

Happening today at #ica2025 @nibasaleem.bsky.social will present our work in Intergroup Communication and @garciaerick.bsky.social will be presenting his collaboration with @overbye.bsky.social @laurentwang.bsky.social and Cecily Zhang on algorithmic biases in @icacat.bsky.social!

🚨New Paper 🚨 In our Special Issue paper, we adopted a multidimensional lens of social identity to examine the bidirectional link between media use and identity among Muslim adolescents. We found stronger within-person effects for media-to-identity, rather than identity-to-media, pathways. #commsky

🚨New Paper🚨 Elections create winners & losers among citizens. But how do we encourage losers to cooperate with new leaders or rally cooperation between winners and losers after a bitterly fought election? This is vital for democracy, especially in polarizing times.

The landmark Handbook of Social Psychology's sixth edition is now available - and open access for the first time! It features 50 chapters from 50+ scholars. Learn more + download it today: ow.ly/RPjn50VV8bT

Neat prejudice reduction intervention resource database from @betsylevyp.bsky.social and colleagues plugged at #SPSP2024. prejudicereduction.princeton.edu (1/3)

Political Psychology by @mjbsp.bsky.social

Social Psychology I by me!

Get to know the UCSB Communication department 🧪 (will update as more people move over to BlueSky) go.bsky.app/TVVRTt1