I am recruiting (Canadian🇨🇦) graduate students at York University for Fall 2026 in Social and Personality Psychology! If you are interested in misinformation, political polarization, and/or computational social science, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗ 📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/... Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

I’m recruiting a PhD student in Social Psychology @ TCU for this application cycle! My lab examines how beliefs and attitudes form, generalize, & shape behavior. We apply this general interest to the study of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and health behavior.

🚨 YA’LL!! HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS PAPER TO COME OUT FOR AGES. IT IS SO SATURN. I MEAN, IT IS SO GOOD. SAME THING. (JUST READ IT)

Our new study: a large-scale RCT showing that standard pedagogical techniques, but also a chatbot (an old school, LLM-less, scripted one!) can help high school students better understand vaccination and develop more positive attitudes.

In this new Commentary in @natclimate.nature.com, I reflect on the recent focus on truth discernment in #misinfo research and argue that this outcome alone may not be beneficial to society if interventions do not improve behaviour and other outcomes because... 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint: From vaccinations to masking, politics predicts health behaviors. In this review we discuss these differences in light of classic psychological theories of group identity and behavioral decision-making. We welcome any feedback on this working paper! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Are you interested in topics related to conflict and intergroup relations *broadly construed*? Come join us as a postdoc in the Dispute Research Research Center! This position is up to 3 years, comes with your own research funding, and a phenomenal network of past DRRC postdocs.

Seeing the same fake news headlines multiple times makes people view sharing them as more acceptable, suggesting that repeated exposure can weaken social norms against spreading misinformation on social media. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #MisinfoResearch

Curious about the mechanisms behind biased reasoning and metacognition? 🤔 📍 Come see our poster at #CCN2025, Aug 12, 1:30–4:30pm We show how a biased drift-diffusion model can explain choice, RT and confidence in a base-rate neglect task, revealing why more deliberation doesn’t always fix bias.

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model Time for new approaches: o True/False → Content that misleads o Belief → Behavior o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

🚨Paper alert Are you interested in interventions against climate disinformation? In this new paper, we introduce the Climate Disinformation Corpus N = 78 real, validated climate disinformation statements that can be use as exprimental stimuli bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 1/n

Western University is offering new scholarships of up to 40k CAD for four years to doctoral students who are studying at, have an offer from, or have had an offer rescinded from one of the top 100 American universities. Come and study with me or one of my colleagues!

She is far too un-self-promoting to do this herself, so I'm shouting out *THE* Elizabeth Page-Gould (@page-gould.bsky.social) for winning the SESP Career Trajectory Award! Liz is the reason they had to invent the high-warmth/high competence quadrant. She is such a gem and so damn deserving of this.

Just published: "Unraveling the Big Lie: Participatory Disinformation and the 2020 Election." Thrilled to see this work out in the world and part of such an amazing compilation. My chapter features my initial research and model on "participatory disinformation": academic.oup.com/book/60493?l...

"Defining deliberation for dual-process models of reasoning" is now published. Free online access to the published Nat Rev Psy version: rdcu.be/erM5T

Improving curation is tough: "Overall, we present evidence that inoculation does not reduce engagement with emotional content and that the benefits of inoculation found in controlled experiments do not transfer to more realistic contexts." #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

🚨In PNAS🚨 The right often accuses fact-checkers of political bias But we analyzed Community Notes on Musk's X and found posts flagged as "misleading" are 2.3x more likely to be written by Reps than Dems! The issue is Reps sharing misinformation, not fact-checker bias... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Psychological inoculation is a very popular intervention against online misinfo, but it hasn't been tested using real-world outcomes in realistic scenarios. In a new paper just published in PNAS Nexus, this is what we did: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... Short version: It didn't really work.

New paper in PSPB! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Well, actually, not "new". We first put this paper online way back Dec 2022... in any case, we think it's really cool! We find that conspiracy believers tend to be overconfident & really don't seem to realize that most disagree with them

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

🚨New WP🚨 Can AI do "deep canvassing"—the time-intensive, empathic persuasive dialogues that durably reduce prejudice when done by humans? Spoiler: Yes! We find durable reduction in prejudice toward undocumented immigrants LLMs make deep canvassing possible at massive scale osf.io/preprints/os...

Recent research shows that AI can durably reduce belief in conspiracies. But does this work b/c the AI is good at producing evidence, or b/c ppl really trust AI? In a new working paper, we show that the effect persists even if the person thinks they're talking to a human: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Come join us! I have startup funds to hire a postdoc for Fall 2025 at Rutgers to study intergroup relations. The job ad is at jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249... & evaluations begin in 1 wk (5/16) w rolling evaluation. See 🧵below for a write-up on what I'm looking for in a postdoc. Please share widely!

Please share widely! #NPSP supports people applying to Psychology PhD programs in the US, including students from underrepresented groups. We're accepting applications til May 23 for mentees (undergrads/postbacs) & mentors (grad students/postdocs)! z.umn.edu/NPSP25-26

A new study finds that expressions of moral outrage increase the virality of online petitions but not signatures. Statements about helping others, on the other hand, do predict a greater number of signatures but aren’t linked to virality. @spspnews.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I wrote an article about the psychology by which disinformation campaigns work, with examples from anti-trans propaganda. It's not just about individual beliefs, but also the way our institutions and norms are manipulated. Please read and share! pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Ant...?

NYU is hiring a Visiting Lecturer in Social Psychology The position is ideal for someone who is applying for academic positions and looking to gain additional research and teaching experience. The salary is $70,000 Applicant review begins MAY 1. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/166631

In 5 experiments (N=2,498), the use of moral–emotional expressions in messages increases intentions to share on social media When people share messages with moral–emotional language, others see them as more partisan + less open-minded Via @williambrady.bsky.social : psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Update: I have been able to confirm grants worth ~$6M were terminated but think the total may be as high as $94M. If you or your colleagues got a termination letter, considering responding to the form. You can do so anonymously.

🚨New in @plosone.org🚨 Corrections of misinfo are often ignored. What can drive engagement? Twitter field exp & survey followups find -Social ties matter: users more likely to engage w corrections from accounts who followed user -Shared partisanship had smaller effects on engagement shorturl.at/0Ycdp

🚨New WP🚨 Using GPT4 to persuade participants significantly reduces climate skepticism and inaction -Sig more effective than consensus messaging -Works for Republicans -Evidence of persistence @ 1mo -Scalable! PDF: osf.io/preprints/ps... Try the bot: www.debunkbot.com/climate-change Here’s how 👇

In our most recent study, which just appeared in Nature Human Behaviour with Segun Aroyehun as lead author (doi.org/10.1038/s415...) , we drew a wider historical arc and examined the rhetoric in all speeches given on the floor of Congress between 1879 and 2022. 16/n

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

New paper! AI lets us query humanity’s collective knowledge (or a subset of it) – rapidly addressing any given concern about vaccines in detail. So can information-focused LLM conversations shift vaccination intentions? In an RCT of 1,124 HPV vax-hesitant parents: yes!

we have now posted the 2024 Cooperative Election Study common content dataset to the @harvarddataverse.bsky.social! data from 60,000 American adults interviewed before & after the election. thanks to @today.yougov.com & Caroline Soler for getting this data produced & posted doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

Read the full study ‘Promoting engagement with social fact-checks online: investigating the roles of social connection and shared partnership’, authors @cameronmartel.bsky.social . @mmosleh.bsky.social , @eckles.bsky.social and @dgrand.bsky.social. Download here: bit.ly/4iR4HbO

Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs. Find out how your community may be impacted. Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org a 🧵

Please please please continue to submit details of your terminated grant using this Google Form 👇 Your submissions continue to be key to understanding patterns of grant terminations and facilitating advocacy and litigation. 💪💪💪

powerful detailed account of ICE captivity "To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me...Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Chilling report from Brown University. Administration advises all foreign students, staff, and faculty to postpone or reconsider (ie cancel) international travel, due to federal government's crackdown on universities. Brown also warns against *domestic travel* -since it's unclear what ICE will do.

New preprint: “Folk Thinking, Fast and Slow: Intuitive Preference for Deliberation in Humans and Machines” Pop culture often praises intuition (“Blink”, Steve Jobs). But do we really trust it? Across 13 studies, we find a strong intuitive preference for deliberation. tinyurl.com/8r54dmyn (1/6)

New research led by @zhpinkman.bsky.social investigating the impact of LLMs on the reduction of linguistic diversity and its societal implications. "We're getting the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else." George Orwell, 1984

Last year, we published a paper showing that AI models can "debunk" conspiracy theories via personalized conversations. That paper raised a major question: WHY are the human<>AI convos so effective? In a new working paper, we have some answers. TLDR: facts osf.io/preprints/ps...

👀New preprint! In 3 prereg experiments we study how engagement-based algorithms amplify ingroup, moral and emotional (IME) content in ways that disrupt social norm learning (and test one solution!) w/ @joshcjackson.bsky.social and my amazing lab managers @merielcd.bsky.social & Silvan Baier 🧵👇

Do you understand how badly you have to fuck up to make Quebec sing the anthem with this much pride

🧵 Knowing which questions to ask is one of the most critical aspects of survey design, but we often rely on guesswork to devise questionnaires. What if we were to rely directly on participants?

This promises to be a very interesting and rewarding event: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/res.... Application deadline 9 March. @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social @wicseurope.bsky.social