Some polling organizations are now using “silicon sampling” – that is, asking AI what the public thinks instead of asking people themselves. In this Q&A, Courtney Kennedy, our vice president of methods and innovation, explains why Pew Research Center does not use this approach. 🧵

“Political breakup” is when politics end a friendship, family bond or relationship. UC Irvine psychology PhD candidate Mertcan Güngör and Professor Peter Ditto explore this phenomenon in new research hot off the PNAS Nexus press: https://ow.ly/Afky50YVR6j

Lots of intriguing articles here about AI, empathy, effort, midlife. All of which are salient! Includes a nod to our empathic AI paper with engineer Alan Wagner, philosopher Martina Orlandi, and more. Denying recipient experience and value in empathetic human-AI interaction may be empathy avoidance

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

🚨🚨 The Social Learning and Decisions Lab is hiring! 🚨🚨 We're looking for a postbacc project coordinator/research assistant to join our team this summer. More details about the position and how to apply here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ySeA... Please share widely and reach out with any questions!

i know several people who consistently argue that the issue of misinformation is overblown. But this paper reveals the devastating harm to society in terms of health, mortality and economic costs linked to widespread misinformation:

This is one of the best resources I’ve seen for applying to postbacc roles and PhD positions!

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! 🔗⬇️

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

It says something really ugly and frightening about us as a country that we can have a president spouting deranged threats to commit unambiguous war crimes & it’s just another week; no immediate action to remove him from office.

Are you an planning on appyiyng for a PhD in psychology in the fall? Want to learn more about the application process and what programs are looking for? Come to our info session!

I wrote this article to explain in plain English what is happening with the proposed 2027 NSF budget & why so many social psychologists are alarmed. THE GOOD NEWS: Congress has not finalized this yet. We have time to change Republican politicians’ minds. www.linkedin.com/pulse/saving...

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Excited to present a new preprint with @nkgarg.bsky.social: presenting usage statistics and observational findings from Paper Skygest in the first six months of deployment! 🎉📜 arxiv.org/abs/2601.04253

This means many brilliant and passionate people who would have normally been admitted to a program (or many programs) received zero offers. This had nothing to do with talent or merit. If possible, try not to take the rejection personally. This happens every year and it seems to be getting worse.

I've seen a lot of demoralized posts (and emails) from people who didn't get into grad school this cycle. This was one of the worst cycles I've ever seen due to massive cuts to research funding, financial difficulties at universities, and technological disruptions.

Entertaining and interesting post by @kurtjgray.bsky.social on how science works using his own research on moral psychology in contrast to @jonathanhaidt.bsky.social's work.

I am so excited to share that I have officially proposed my Masters thesis titled “I’m not White, I’m Italian”: The Consequences of Ethnic Identification on White Americans’ Privilege Recognition and Diversity Ideologies! Thank you to my mentor Dr. Caitlyn Yantis for her support on this project!

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! 🎉

The more active users are on social media, the more polarized they are! The opinions of the these extreme users are filling your newsfeed, but they are not representative of most citizens or even most social media users--which are far less polarized! arxiv.org/pdf/2603.021...

I am excited to share that I presented my research twice at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Chicago! I am grateful for this opportunity to connect with amazing scholars within the field of Social Psychology and begin sharing my research with a wider audience!

“Not all polarization is equivalent nor undesirable” New preprint by Felipe Vilanova and @flavioazevedo.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

“Urging those targeted by discrimination or authoritarian mobilization to empathize with their aggressors mirrors a familiar moral inversion: it relocates responsibility for harmony onto the vulnerable rather than the powerful.”

In an interesting #SPSP2026 talk, @asmiley.bsky.social presented work suggesting that the proportion of out-partisans at one’s church had a curvilinear association with affective polarization—politically balanced churches showed the lowest rates of affective polarization.

Happy conference season! Looking back at my poster from the 2024 Eastern Psychological Association meeting in Philly. Wishing everyone presenting at EPA and SPSP this weekend the best of luck!

New article in Nature describes a field experiment on X which shows that assigning users to an algorithmic feed pushes conservative content and demotes mainstream news. Sounds obvious but important in light of prior claims algorithms don't cause attitudinal changes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper in Current Directions in Psych Science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... After countless arguments about what tasks ppl should/should not offload to AI, we instead argue that genAI can be used *augment* research protocols in novel ways. I.e. use AI to make better psych experiments!

Across social media platforms, political posting is linked to affective polarization--extreme users post the most. As polarized partisans increasingly dominate the conversation, casual users disengage and the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more extreme. arxiv.org/html/2510.25...

New publication with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social in @commspsychol.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... AI empathy is good, but would people actually choose to turn to AI for emotional support over a human empathizer?

Today in Hagerstown, I stood with Senator Chris Van Hollen and hundreds of neighbors to say clearly: we do not want an ICE facility in our community.

Even in the AI era, learning to quickly "read" an academic article is an essential skill. When I started grad school, I thought I had to read every word, in order, for every article I "read". I don’t do that anymore. Here’s how I "read" most academic articles:

How can we actually break echo chambers at scale? Ever notice how some political conversations feel over before they start? Often, they ended somewhere else — in feeds, podcasts, and videos you never saw. This isn’t just disagreement; it’s living in separate information worlds. 🧵

Someone today sent me some fake news that was also aligned with my views. I rejected it, completely. You can do this too. Don't judge the validity of a statement solely by whether it aligns with your beliefs.

Graduate school interview season is approaching. After ~12 years of interviewing PhD and MD/PhD applicants, I’ve noticed some common interview mistakes that hold otherwise strong candidates back... #GraduateSchool #PhDLife #MDPhD #GradSchoolTips #AcademicBluesky 👇

Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication. For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.

Sunday in Sterling, Va. Details and tickets at www.ticketleap.events/tickets/prof... .

The horrific tragedy at Brown University is the 389th mass shooting this year and the 230th gun incident on school grounds so far this year. This is not normal and we don't have to live this way. bradyunited.org @bradyunited.org

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Interesting review documenting the rise in scholarship on visual misinformation, how it is more persuasive than text misinformation, and how #GenAI is both increasing visual misinformation content and being used to combat it. (!) #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1080/1520...

We need to talk about how social media algorithms push moms down a slippery slope of distrust. From "Are my kids getting enough support in school?" To "Maybe I should homeschool." To "Maybe modern medicine is bad." I've seen this first-hand in research I'm doing on parenting apps. 1/🧵

Cool new study by @joelleforestier.bsky.social @page-gould.bsky.social & Alison Chasteen Can social media contact reduce prejudice? #PrejudiceResearch psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Critical ignoring offers some great strategies to help navigate our noisy information landscape.

People across the political spectrum suddenly agree that social media can lead to political violence and online calls for civil war have skyrocketed I explain how social media rewards negativity, division and hostility--and what we can all do about it: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/social-med...

I heard that students need to have a 1st author paper to get into a PhD program This is not true in psychology--most students we admit at NYU & most of the students from my own lab who got into PhD programs do not have publications, let alone 1st author publications www.science.org/content/arti...

Are you accepting PhD applications in Clinical Psychology for Fall 2026 (U.S.)? If so, please consider adding your name to the document linked in the comments. Our hope is to help reduce the load on applicants. Please share widely and on X! #clinicalpsychology @abctnow.bsky.social

I have finally gotten round to writing my AI Use Statement for a grad. course I'm teaching in Gen AI... I would be grateful of your thoughts!

📊How do people in couples influence each other's political preferences? New research suggests that our closest relationships actively shape our political identities rather than simply reflecting pre-existing similarities. Read more in #PSPB: ow.ly/ZO2k50WM9a0

Very useful set of guidelines for conducting social psychology lab experiments by @eddiehj.bsky.social, @davidamodio.bsky.social, and colleagues. Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Few quotes follow…

None of this research suppresses free speech. All this research advances knowledge & understanding about how science is communicated to the public, how the public learns & thinks about science, & how scientific knowledge is put into practice. 6/