New post (link in comments):

The Words Can Harm Scale was recently covered in The Wall Street Journal - check it out below! www.wsj.com/opinion/free...

We gave 30 couples without kids an infant simulator for the weekend and tracked how they handled it. Nope, this isn't a reality show: it's a scientific paper! 🍼 New in Human Nature 👇🔗

psych post-bacc jobs are scattered across wikis, twitter/bsky, and random lab sites. hard to find if you're not already in the field. I started a slack to pool them in one place — a low-effort bulletin board, channels by subfield, updated live! 🔗⬇️

Excited to share that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Feeling very grateful for my amazing mentors and collaborators.

Thrilled to share I'll be starting a PhD in Psychology at Yale this fall with Melissa Ferguson — and that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support my work! Can't wait to get started! 🥳 #NSFGRFP

I'm working on a post with an online science blog and they replaced all of my em dashes with commas, even where grammatically inappropriate. Is this the new anti-AI signaling?

I started a newsletter and my first post is about the twitter reactions to our new Words Can Harm Scale. Link in comments!

"Studying people’s deeply held beliefs is a funny thing. No matter how unbiased you try to be, you typically end up upsetting people on both sides, because each assumes your agenda is against them. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing the research."

Our recent PSPB paper showing that liberals and conservatives have different perceptions of victimhood (AoVs) is generating quite a bit of discussion on r/science. Short summary of the results (and 🔗 ) below 🧵

🚨 New paper in Personality and Individual Differences! We introduce the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS): a 10-item measure of the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm. Who believes that words can harm, and what does this belief predict?🧵 ⬇️

Can words be harmful? A new scale by @sampratt99.bsky.social et al scores the strength of the belief they can. High scorers tend to be younger, female, non-White and liberal, and self-rate as high in intellectual humility, empathy and moral grandstanding: buff.ly/UZu4znx

This past weekend, I attended @ap-ls.org in Reno, Nevada and presented a poster on the co-occurrence of true crime consumption & victim-blaming attitudes. 🧪⚖️ #apls2026

Last month, I presented my poster on how true crime consumption relates to victim blaming at #SPSP2026 in Chicago — and I'm so honored to have received the Best Poster Award at the Moral Psychology pre-conference! 🎉

⚖️ New paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences! Legal decisions hinge on who counts as a victim — but our judgments are biased & hard to change. We propose solutions: victim impact statements, funding restorative justice, & acknowledgments for exonerees.

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

I am crowdsourcing divisive TV episodes for a study on moral disagreement. If you know of episodes that make for heated conversation, please complete the form below and pass it on! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Looking for hands-on psychology research experience? We've compiled summer programs, internships, and opportunities specifically for undergraduates. Explore the full guide: https://ow.ly/sWBj50XT9SM

It's that time of year - lots of people are hunting for postbacc research jobs and aren't sure where to start. Below are some helpful resources I compiled from my experience. Please feel free to share with others! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

There is def reason to worry about impact of LLMs in science, but one benefit they've already had is eroding the heuristic that complex writing = good writing LLMs can mask a bad idea with elegant writing, which makes complexity a bad signal of quality. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m taking grad level social psych and am noting examples of social/personality psych directly influencing society. Any other favorite examples? -Good Samaritan laws (bystander effect) -Mass marketing/political messaging (Yale Approach) -Personality traits (Allport) -Dating apps (similarity effect)

Pleased to share our paper Sending Signals: Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces is an Editor’s Choice paper in JEP:A 🥳 Trigger warnings and safe spaces are increasingly popular. We asked: do they shape how students perceive the classroom climate? psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Why do some health choices seem like moral issues 💉😷 whereas others are personal preferences 🦷🧘? Our new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that we moralize health behaviors when we see them as causing harm. doi.org/10.1177/0146...

Nobel prizes are out, did anyone else get honorable mention?

New post about the signals that trigger warnings and safe spaces send to students in SPSP blog👇

Introducing the Words Can Harm Scale: a measure of the belief that words can cause psychological harm. Preprint and online assessment in next tweet!

✍️ New Preprint: "Sticks and stones may break my bones..." but can words really harm? We created the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS) to measure the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm. You can take the online assessment here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...

People often rely on their own judgment over the "wisdom of the crowds" when making tough decisions (e.g., "which school should I attend?") A new study found that across 12 countries, most participants went with their gut even when given the option to consult others.

New study finds that as birth rates have declined, we've started spending more on pets. And across several studies, dog lovers often prioritized dogs over people in moral dilemmas 🐶 > 🙍

A new study seems to show that right-leaning participants care more about left-leaning causes than right-leaning ones 🤯 A surprising finding, but I think we should be cautious about this interpretation 🧵 1/8

People are averse to "doubling back": in a virtual reality maze game, over half (56%) of participants chose a longer route over a more efficient route when the efficient option required them to "double back", effectively undoing their previous progress.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: "The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness"

Our recent paper on trigger warnings was covered by @psypost.bsky.social . You can read the article at the link below.

Feeling mixed feelings on my last day as lab manager in the Deepest Beliefs Lab. It's been an amazing two years working with @kurtjgray.bsky.social and I'm so grateful for all the amazing people I've worked with. But lots to look forward to starting at UCLA in two months!

This week's Science to Impact symposium at Ohio State hosted experts in all kinds of science communication! Grateful to have helped organize this event and heard from these minds in one room. 🧠 🧪

55-70% of people followed an arbitrary rule (e.g., wait at a stoplight until a cross disappears) even when 1) nobody is watching, 2) they would get money for breaking the rule, and 3) breaking the rule harms nobody Open access paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper in JEP Applied: Why do so many instructors use trigger warnings or announce that their classroom is a "safe space"? We find that these practices send important signals about the instructor's intentions, values, and political commitments. @apajournals.bsky.social

Very cool experience giving a talk at the YMCA summer camp I attended in New Hampshire from age 9-16. I spoke about the youth mental health crisis and how summer camps can provide boys and young men with a sense of belonging.

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.

Some promising trends in the psychology replication crisis since 2004: - Fewer studies publish weak p values (.01 < p < .05) - Studies with weak p values are less likely to get cited - The % of weak p values (26%) is now roughly what we would expect from studies with 80% power.

AI is quickly becoming a valuable tool in psychological research. I created a short guide to help you use it well (link in comments 👇). Includes CustomGPTs, example prompts, and tools for lit reviews, survey design, data analysis, and manuscript prep.

I recently had the chance to go on the Outrage Overload Podcast (@outrageoverload.net‬) with David Beckemeyer. We discussed the psychology of morality, the role of victimhood in political conflict, and how we might lower the temperature on society's biggest divides. Link in the comments!

Lots of famous findings about human behavior are built on the results of economic games - tasks where participants allocate resources or make choices with different payoffs. A new study finds that up to 70% of participants don't understand the instructions of these games.

New post: What do a physicist in a strip club, a pop star in a church, and government officials making war plans in a group chat have in common? 🔬🎤💣 The setting is all wrong—so wrong that their decisions start to feel immoral. (🔗 in thread)

I had a great time this weekend presenting with @emilykubin.bsky.social at the Templeton World Charity Foundation Listening and Learning in a Polarized World meetup in Marrakesh, Morocco. @templetonworld.bsky.social put on an amazing event!

@sampratt99.bsky.social and I are having a fantastic time in Marrakesh Morocco discussing polarization and pluralism. Enjoying the great discussions across disciplines to tackle some of the most pressing societal issues. Thanks Templeton World Charity Foundation for organizing this event!

I’m excited to share that I’ll be starting a PhD in Social Psychology at UCLA this fall. I’ll be working in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab with Dr. Matt Lieberman, studying consciousness and morality. I can’t wait for this next chapter!

New Paper in Philosophical Psychology: Trust in experts is low. Why? How bad is it? And what should we do? To answer these questions, we reviewed philosophy (when *ought* we defer to the experts) and psychology (when *do* people defer to the experts). Link in comments!

A year ago @kurtjgray and I argued that popular discourse about the "loneliness epidemic" might be making people more lonely. Today @NatureComms published direct evidence for this: reading news stories about the risks of isolation makes people feel worse about being alone. 🧵