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/

Good luck to everyone presenting at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in NYC this weekend!

When presenting research on the persuasive effects of diff messages, a common question is whether the effects generalize to other ppl/populations. An important question, but a question that I think is very under-appreciated is whether the effects generalize to other *messages like this one*. 1/x

Hey SPSP members! 👋 Proposed U.S. federal budget cuts would significantly impact psychology funding and research. We just published an Advocacy Alert with actionable steps you can take today. Check out the link for ways to make your voice heard: spsp.org/news/spsp-n...

Zotero is great and I think that anyone who needs to organise and cite more than a handful of references should be using it. Here's an intro to Zotero that I made for my undergrad students (but the info is relevant for anyone new to Zotero). Full vid [13 mins]: youtu.be/SlUHjOqVCyU Preview ⬇️

Check out the March edition of political behavior! There are tons of open access artciles! link.springer.com/journal/1110...

#WritingTip: You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages. Write. Just write.