Check out this research lead by Olivia Fischer and @renatofrey.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy with cool insights into risky choices people face in real life!
03.03.2026 16:07
👍 5
🔁 1
💬 0
📌 0
Check out this research lead by Olivia Fischer and @renatofrey.mstdn.science.ap.brid.gy with cool insights into risky choices people face in real life!
Abstract: This piece critiques the dominant assumption in social and political psychology, as well as in political science and other disciplines, that polarization is inherently undesirable and should therefore be reduced under all circumstances. We argue that this premise reflects a neutrality bias (or depoliticizing bias) that obscures the asymmetrical nature of contemporary political conflict. We distinguish democratic polarization—agonistic contestation among actors who accept multicultural pluralism, democratic institutions and election outcomes, civil and human rights, and epistemic accountability—from anti-democratic polarization, in which conflict is strategically mobilized to delegitimize opponents, erode institutional constraints, and normalize dehumanization, scapegoating, misinformation, anti-scientific, and conspiratorial narratives as a route to political power. In a global context marked by the growing...
“Not all polarization is equivalent nor undesirable”
New preprint by Felipe Vilanova and @flavioazevedo.bsky.social:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨New WP: Can an AI voter guide (grounded in information from a nonpartisan, fact-checked source) help voters’ decision making? 🚨
We built and evaluated an LLM-based chatbot that provided voting info in CA & TX (N=2,474) right before the 2024 election. 🧵👇
🚀 dashboardr is out!
An #rstats package for building interactive dashboards with tidyverse-style syntax.
Launched with a fun hackathon at @ascor.bsky.social (🍕 included).
📦: favstats.github.io/dashboardr/
Big thanks to the dashboardr team, Digicomlab, and @vivifabrien.bsky.social for the logo 🎨
Many thanks to PublicFirst (www.publicfirst.co.uk) and all the fantastic colleagues I worked with during my secondment there, and to the MSCA Doctoral Network IP-PAD (www.ippad.eu) for making the secondment possible in the first place.
Instead, identities such as nationality, age, or gender tend to be more central. Engaging with those identities and countering attempts to use them in exclusionary ways or to stir further conflict may offer a way toward reducing societal division.
The social groups we belong to shape how we see ourselves, but which ones matter most? Using survey data from ~2,000 UK adults, I show that while political parties and ideology may matter in certain contexts, they are rarely the first things that come to mind when people think about who they are.
Politics Doesn’t Define How Most People See Themselves
I’ve written a blog post just published by The Inquisitive Mind.
Link: www.in-mind.org/blog/post/po...
Very brief summary in the thread.
Do negative encounters with immigrants activate personality effects in PRR support? @cvalebeek.bsky.social, Daniel Komáromy, @delaneypeterson.bsky.social & @mrooduijn.bsky.social find it's not generally the case but initial exposure & out-group framing may matter: buff.ly/D5C50zO (OPEN ACCESS)
🌍 New megastudy on what motivates people to engage in climate advocacy 🥳
We tested 17 theory-driven behavior change interventions to increase public, political, and financial #climate advocacy in the United States (N = 31,324).
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....
Stop Formatting Before the Desk Reject
Proposal from @bnbakker.bsky.social and @jakobkas.bsky.social for a staged submission process when submitting manuscripts to academic journals.
#AcademicSky #PhDSky #AcWri
New preprint by @semihaktepe.bsky.social 🎉
We compare ANOVA/SDT/GLMM for binary judgments in 20 datasets of the truth effect. #lme4
Main conclusion:
"GLMMs are a theoretically sound and practically robust method and thus superior for analyzing binary judgments in social and cognitive psychology.”
Who is the Big Tobacco of today?
In new work, we find 50% of high profile social media papers are connected to big tech through funding, collaboration and employment. Most connections aren't disclosed. @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @jevinwest.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com 1
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507
Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry?
New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com.
Thread tomorrow.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507
Average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" plotted over time
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).>
So the US administration considers hate speech and disinformation “American viewpoints“? 🙄
HateAid is an organization that also helps climate scientists to defend themselves against online abuse and threats.
Its founder was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 🇩🇪 this year.
New publication with @turnbulldugarte.com in @psrm.bsky.social! 🧵
We study whether citizens’ liberal values are selective: do people support policies based on who promotes them?
Short answer: Yes, and it's driven by ethnic out-group disidentification. (1/11) 👇
doi.org/10.1017/psrm...
🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨
We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait
The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...
Partisanship has positive and negative contributions to representative democracies.
In POQ, Kasper & Bakker review Bankert's book, which explores how we can amplify the positive impacts while mitigating the negative ones.
Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
Just published in Behavior Research Methods:
The individual-level precision of implicit measures
w/ @ianhussey.mmmdata.io
🧵👇
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨
AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp
🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK
🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks)
🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy
🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate
New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf...
🧵
This work was conducted at the @hotpoliticslab.bsky.social @ascor.bsky.social, and funded by the MSCA IP-PAD Doctoral Network (www.ippad.eu). Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback along the way - we welcome any comments!
To summarize: By integrating arousal, we strengthen the conceptual foundations of affective polarization research and improve the predictive validity of related measures. We show the value of taking the 'affect' in affective polarization seriously.
Finally, we compare our framework to discrete-emotions approaches demonstrating that our model based on valence and arousal captures most of the same information while being more parsimonious.
We also introduce a one-dimensional arousal-weighted metric of affective polarization as a compromise solution that remains similar to previous operationalizations, but more effectively integrates emotional arousal.
3 - An arousal-based dimension of affective polarization shows distinct (and often stronger) associations with key political correlates such as political engagement, ideological extremity, and democratic attitudes.
2 - Valence and arousal are distinct dimensions both needed to describe affective experiences in reaction to political actors. Arousal does not simply mirror valence or its intensity. Strong negative evaluations may be accompanied by either high or low arousal, depending on the context.
Our key findings:
1 - Traditional feeling thermometers are a measure of emotional valence.