Best part of the job! Congratulations Dr @chiarazazzarino.bsky.social 🎓

ISPP Small Grants are back for 2026! 💡 $50k total available; request up to $5k for research or network/workshop projects. Open to current ISPP members. Proposals due Dec 1, 2025. Selection uses a lottery among proposals that meet all criteria. Apply: ispp.org/funding/smal...

Thank you so much for having me @hansalves.bsky.social et al.! Always great fun to hang out with German social psychologists!

Moral outrage spreads petitions online—but doesn’t always inspire people to sign them

The 2025 EASP Summer School at the University of Kent is kicking off in just a few days and we are SO excited to welcome 80 brilliant early-career researchers from across Europe for 10 days of collaboration, community, and cutting-edge social psychology 🙏 Find out more: blogs.kent.ac.uk/easp2025/

Spending your weekend with @polpsyispp.bsky.social in Prague? Join us for these talks: SAT, July 5 11:05am – 12:20pm S93: @alekscichocka.bsky.social The energy island: Texan collective narcissism predicts support for an independent power grid

Just like individual narcissists, who have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and grandiosity, national narcissists believe that their nation is exceptional and entitled to special treatment. We explain the dark side of social identity in our latest newsletter: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Don’t miss our lab’s Friday talks at @polpsyispp.bsky.social in Prague: 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM S53 Tamino Konur: Does Gender Identity Compensate for Ethnic Discrimination? Alessia Bacigalupo: Women, Borders and the Nation: How Sexism Predicts Nationalism and Immigration Policy Support

Heading to @polpsyispp.bsky.social in Prague? Check out these awesome talks from our lab tomorrow (Thu, Jul 3): 11:40 AM - 12:55 S21: Daniel Toribio-Flórez: Examining the political consequences of conspiracy theories around general elections: Evidence from the UK, France and US

New: Adamczyk & colleagues compared national identification to national narcissism & found that the former is related to support for democracy & voting intentions, while the latter was associated with anarchism & lower voting intentions. doi.org/10.1027/1864...

Proud to celebrate with @chiarazazzarino.bsky.social her fantastic PhD defense yesterday 🥂Chiara’s research funded by @leverhulme.ac.uk examined how leaders use national identity rhetoric to gain political support. Congratulations Dr Zazzarino 🎓

A popularizing version of joint work with Liz Mancuso, @jayvanbavel.bsky.social , and others. psyche.co/guides/how-t...

"Platforms are calibrated to capture attention by amplifying moralized and emotional content. This can have benefits, such as raising awareness of injustices by propagating expressions of outrage," explains @stefanleach.bsky.social phys.org/news/2025-05...

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/...

Social media is a great tool for activists but can the viral spread of moral outrage sometimes undermine collective causes? We examined this in a new SPPS paper led by @stefanleach.bsky.social analyzing 1,286,442 posts on X with URLs to petitions on change.org journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Out now, open access at Psychology of Violence! How do authoritarianism and social dominance orientation affect attitudes toward collective violence in Lebanon? (with @ramziabouismail.bsky.social, @alekscichocka.bsky.social, and @sengupta.bsky.social) psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... 🧵

Seems timely to highlight recent work by @genaveebrown.bsky.social and @gaellemarinthe.bsky.social In two studies they found that national narcissism in France and the US was associated with more favourable views of Putin and seeing the war as less immoral rips-irsp.com/articles/10....

Our meta-analysis "Reasons to believe: A systematic review and meta-analytic synthesis of the motives associated with conspiracy beliefs" is now published at Psychological Bulletin! Please refer to this thread, ResearchGate, and PsyArXiv for details! psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

Special Issue Alert! How do digital & social media fuel alternative identities, extreme narratives & online communities in times of crisis? Submit your work exploring their role in propaganda, misinformation, and reshaping society! ispp.org/wp/wp-conten... @polpsyispp.bsky.social #polisky

📢 Our new paper in Political Analysis explains how to use LLMs like GPT-4o, Llama or Mistral to estimate the ideological and policy position of political texts. Our approach is fast, reliable, cost-effective and reproducible and works with texts written in different languages 1/7 cup.org/4axBEXo

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

Next on my “when the baby sleeps on me” reading list!

Can’t believe it’s been 20 years since I was watching Trail of Dead’s “The rest will follow” video on MTV. Now I’m married to their bassist and hoping our newborn will inherit his music talents rather than mine 😂

Another illustration of diplomacy of collective narcissism - a belief that one’s country is exceptional and entitled to special treatment. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Politics of collective narcissism: "These changes reaffirm the Nation's commitment to preserving the extraordinary heritage of the United States and ensuring that future generations of Americans celebrate the legacy of its heroes and historic assets”

For anyone who’s interested in this route to joining us at @polpsychkent.bsky.social, our research office is typically happy to put together a list of relevant funding opportunities (depending on country of origin, years since PhD etc.)

Over the 2020 US and NZ elections, antidemocratic attitudes preceded conspiracy beliefs, rather than conspiracy beliefs fostering antidemocratic attitudes by @lindaskitka.bsky.social & many others in @ispp-pops.bsky.social #socpsych #polisky #polpsych onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

How you measure conspiracy belief endorsement matters! Likert vs binary vs trichotomous response choices onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Interested in updates on research in political psychology at Kent research.kent.ac.uk/political-ps...? Follow @polpsychkent.bsky.social!

Major collective narcissism vibes at the inauguration: „The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation. And we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”

I totally agree with Liz and Mark that political psychology is a broad tent - broader than many realise! If you are working on relevant topics but are not sure if your work might fit the @ispp-pops.bsky.social journal, feel free to DM and I’m happy to take a look 🧐

What an exciting new chapter for Political Psychology🎉 Congratulations and good luck @lizsuhay.bsky.social and @mjbsp.bsky.social!

How do you change the behaviour of the world? Psychology found its way into Covid policy in several ways. But did it work? @jackandrews.bsky.social looked at the research… www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

How psychology found its way into policy: @jackandrews.bsky.social discussing our work on how social and behavioural science supported Covid pandemic response www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

We have a new paper explaining all the ways you can use natural language processing to analyze text data in @natrevpsych.bsky.social We provide user friendly recommendations for using NLP to ensure rigour and reproducibility Here is a free link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Amazing to see these results 🎉Many researchers did great work during the pandemic, despite major professional and personal challenges. And of course pleased to see that our paper led by Anni Sternisko was one of the successful replications.

Feelings of entitlement characterise not only individual but also collective narcissism (the latter being a belief that one’s country is exceptional and deserves privileged treatment).

A few years ago, Douglas, Sutton and I suggested that conspiracy beliefs might be linked to epistemic needs (to feel informed), existential needs (to feel secure), and social needs (to feel valued). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Two new papers with our collaborators examine this claim 1/8

been seeing lots of work lately on whether LLMs can give ethical counsel, but i am not so optimistic. it's pretty hard to know good advice when you get it! and sometimes the best moral advice transcends the prompt. www.scientificamerican.com/article/plea... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky

Check out our new meta-analysis of psychological motives associated with conspiracy beliefs, forthcoming in Psych Bull! Highlights below by the amazing @mikeybiddlestone.bsky.social who led the project through it’s crazy long review process.

Our new paper led by @ealbath.bsky.social clarifies which psychological needs predict belief in conspiracy theories. Using RICPM we found that within-person decreases in personal control and belonging, but increases in levels of meaning in life, temporally precede increases in conspiracy belief.

Totally agree! And there’s also the issue of different reference cultures, which can harm international candidates. American letters are often seen as OTT and unrealistic in many European countries, while the more reserved letters from Europe might seem lukewarm in the US…

New paper in Nature Comp Reviews led by the brilliant @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social & @tiancheng.bsky.social 👉LLMs exhibit group identity biases. Across 77 LLMs, most “we” (ingroup) prompts yielded more positive while “they” (outgroup) returned more negative sentiment www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Fantastic opportunity to work with wonderful mentors!

Wrote (or read) a great book on mass politics published in 2024? Please (self-)nominate for the ISPP Sears Best Book award! The deadline is December 15. Details here: ispp.org/awards/sears/ We are looking forward to reading your work!

Extremely excited we will be hosting the EASP summer school at Kent 🎓Check out the amazing program and teachers 🤩 There will also be amazing guest lectures by @jayvanbavel.bsky.social (and more!) I’m not teaching this time but will be involved in a mentoring session with @jimaceverett.bsky.social

More evidence for personality predicting political preferences:

Political scientists: 2025 award nominations from the APSA Political Psychology section are open! Please consider nominating a colleague (or yourself!) for a dissertation, book, paper, junior scholar, or career achievement award. connect.apsanet.org/s28/nominati...

Despite what many folks falsely said, research on the pandemic was rock solid: COVID studies were more likely to use stronger designs, larger samples, justify their sample sizes based on power analysis, pre-register their hypotheses and analysis plans + make their data, materials & code available!