🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...
🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?
We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...
Meet the window heat pump: A compact unit that's relatively cheap and takes half an hour to install.
While they're not widely available yet, they could prove to be an important climate solution in the future.
@wbur.org #energysky #decarbonization
www.wbur.org/news/2026/02...
Soc Theory Nerds should check out @dsilver432.bsky.social's always illuminating Substack. The most recent missive, on "The Iron Cage of Authenticity" is fun into Tay Tay's philosophy (Charles Taylor, of course. Did you think Taylor Swift?). thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/the-iron-c...
This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualising institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalisation and institutional change are best understood by focussing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity, leading to dynamics of centralisation and decentralisation of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.
New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social:
Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis
Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Keytar Bear and that one really enthusiastic red line conductor are doing important public service and should be protected at all costs.
Just saw Keytar Bear playing a Red Line stop in single digit windchill. They are one of the best parts about living in Boston. Kudos to people who make public joy in tough times.
When we moved to Indiana in 2012, my husband was working remotely, and the isolation was rough, so he started looking for local social activities and ended up starting a rec hockey league. Sadly, the league fell apart when we left Indiana in 2022, because no one stepped up to run it in his place.
We're mourning yet again in Minnesota — and struggling to square the gut-churning video of Alex Pretti's final moments with official accounts.
I'm teaching techniques of neutralization this term, so I made this quick slide on the DHS statement. Share if it's useful. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...
The University of Minnesota has confirmed that Mr. Pretti was a 2011 graduate of our CLA Geography Department's Biology, Society, and the Environment program -- a few floors down from my sociology office.
He will *not* be forgotten. apnews.com/article/immi...
With apologies for the self-promotion, if you're interested in learning about how faith leaders built the network that this clergy and religious resistance grew out of, I have just the book for you!
uncpress.org/978146967316...
Attention undergrads! @pewresearch.org has more than a dozen paid internships for rising juniors and seniors this summer in Washington, DC.
Find more info here: www.pewresearch.org/about/intern...
Apply here: pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...
Wondering why those new university "civics centers" are silent on the deadly constitutional crisis happening in Minnesota.
hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/civics-cen...
a useful parsing of the age-period-cohort problem for Australian loneliness in this thread
Figure 4. SES Differences in Effort Intensity by Incentive Condition and Round. The figure shows a gap in effort intensity between students whose parents have tertiary education, versus no tertiary education. The intensity gap closes as the experimental conditions introduce more incentives for effort.
Absolutely fascinating new study in ASR: Lab experiment with 5th graders finds "even individual effort does not appear immune to the influence of socioeconomic origins."
doi.org/10.1177/0003...
What an honor for our documentary podcast When the Wolves Came to be named one of The Atlantic’s Top 20 Podcasts of 2025. Wild way to end a wild year!
Read all about it here!
Fun new work on political behavior/donations: doi.org/10.1111/socf...
"several important trends, all of which challenge simplistic stereotypes of American professors as some sort of Marxist intellectual vanguard or as professional mouthpieces for the US capitalist class."
Line chart showing that since 2020, there's been little change in the religious composition of the U.S. public
Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. Key measures of religiousness are holding steady in the United States, continuing a period of relative stability that began about five years ago. www.pewresearch.org/...
Ooooo cool new study:
"...the relationship between religiosity and conformism is stronger in more religious countries and birth cohorts, and conformists are more likely to disaffiliate in contexts where larger proportions of the population are nonreligious."
academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...
We first note that hand-wringing about the decline in US college enrollments has mistakenly linked such declines to the price of four-year colleges.
But the decline is entirely driven by two-year community colleges (and by for-profit colleges). The four-year sector is the dog that didn't bark.
Stop submitting AI slop to journals and preprint servers
This is anti-social behavior. It is making life harder for everyone involved except for the person submitting the slop
“WASHINGTON—Citing that a majority of Americans are irresponsible, easily distracted people who have little regard for other human beings, a new Dept of Transportation report revealed that it’s ‘actually kind of crazy’ that U.S. citizens are allowed to drive automobiles.”
The Onion strikes again.
One big, achievable win for the American Sociological Association @asanews.bsky.social: create a single upload recommendation system for doctoral admissions (akin to the law school admissions).
One upload for each student would be a real blessing.
We met up with @sssreligion.bsky.social recently in Minneapolis, Minnesota to ask "What Are You Working On?" Meet emerging scholars and familiar faces working on all things religious scholarship!
A person stands at a podium giving a conference presentation in a hotel meeting room. A projection screen next to them displays a colorful slide titled “Spirituality at Scale: A Large-Sample Study of Tarot Readings,” co-authored by an associate professor and a PhD candidate in sociology at UMass Boston. The presenter faces the audience while the slide includes bright geometric shapes in blue, orange, pink, and yellow tones.
👏 Exciting news!
PhD candidate Cam Marsinelli (@cmarsinelli.bsky.social) presented research at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Minneapolis.
With Dr. Evan Stewart (@evanstewart.bsky.social), they used AI to analyze YouTube tarot readings + engagement. Congrats! 💙 #UMB #Sociology
For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13%
Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006)
The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%).
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
There is an important point about religious pluralism here: as demographics change we are going to encounter more and more disagreement about these kinds of cases. "Is this a religious symbol?" vs. "Is it a broader symbol of first responders?" gets higher stakes with more religiously unaffiliated.
As a researcher who studies public religious expression, it is really important to separate it from personal religious adherence - unexpected combinations of the two are more common than we would think!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Which, for me, is really interesting to see at the local level even in a conventionally "blue" state.
www.wbur.org/news/2025/10...
"Koch is a devout Catholic...But even as an independent, he received support from Gov. Maura Healey and other key Democrats..."
