Cover page of a journal article titled "The Psychology of Victimhood in the Law"
⚖️ New paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences!
Legal decisions hinge on who counts as a victim — but our judgments are biased & hard to change. We propose solutions: victim impact statements, funding restorative justice, & acknowledgments for exonerees.
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).>
I am crowdsourcing divisive TV episodes for a study on moral disagreement. If you know of episodes that make for heated conversation, please complete the form below and pass it on!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Group of young adults sitting indoors, one focused on his smartphone while others chat or wait nearby.
Looking for hands-on psychology research experience? We've compiled summer programs, internships, and opportunities specifically for undergraduates.
Explore the full guide: https://ow.ly/sWBj50XT9SM
It's that time of year - lots of people are hunting for postbacc research jobs and aren't sure where to start. Below are some helpful resources I compiled from my experience. Please feel free to share with others!
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
For LLM-assisted manuscripts, lexical complexity is negatively correlated with publication success and reviewer scores.
Hopefully this will push us to prioritize clear, concise scientific writing over superficially complex writing (imo, simple writing was always better).
There is def reason to worry about impact of LLMs in science, but one benefit they've already had is eroding the heuristic that complex writing = good writing
LLMs can mask a bad idea with elegant writing, which makes complexity a bad signal of quality.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I’m taking grad level social psych and am noting examples of social/personality psych directly influencing society. Any other favorite examples?
-Good Samaritan laws (bystander effect)
-Mass marketing/political messaging (Yale Approach)
-Personality traits (Allport)
-Dating apps (similarity effect)
Thanks again to my fantastic co-authors Payton Jones, Victoria Bridgland, Benjamin Bellet, and Rich McNally
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40608447/
So, do trigger warnings and safe spaces belong in the classroom?
Though we can't answer this for instructors, our data suggest that TWs fall short at improving students' perceptions of the classroom, but students react positively when the classroom is framed as a safe space.
BUT: safe spaces also made instructors seem more liberal and left-wing authoritarian—a scale that includes items about censoring conservative ideas. Mentioning that the classroom is a "safe space" raises the question: safe for which ideas?
Safe spaces had benefits!
When instructors described the classroom as a safe space, students saw them as more caring and felt more psychologically safe and willing to discuss controversial issues.
In conclusion, though 83–92% of our sample agreed that trigger warnings should be used, those randomly assigned to receive one felt no better about the classroom or their instructors than those who didn’t.
But what about safe spaces?
Trigger warnings didn’t help even among students with a history of trauma—the group they’re often meant to support. 44% of these students reported that the trigger warning reminded them of their past trauma, but these students did not feel more positively after receiving a TW.
A common argument for trigger warnings is that they’re polite: they signal respect and make students feel supported. But we found no evidence for this.
Students who were randomly assigned to receive a warning felt no more positively about their instructors or the classroom.
Pleased to share our paper Sending Signals: Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces is an Editor’s Choice paper in JEP:A 🥳
Trigger warnings and safe spaces are increasingly popular. We asked: do they shape how students perceive the classroom climate?
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
This work would not have been possible without my excellent co-authors Daniel Rosenfeld, Amelia Goranson, @janettphd.bsky.social, Paschal Sheeran, and @kurtjgray.bsky.social !
Full paper: doi.org/10.1177/0146...
From vaccines 💉 to diets 🍎 , many health issues have become moral battlegrounds. These issues seem different on the surface, but we suggest that they each become moralized when seen as causing harm to other people.
Study 5:
In another version, we described sleep aids as preventing harm - reducing traffic deaths by improving sleep. Moralization flipped: people now saw using sleep aids as morally praiseworthy 👏 😊
Study 5:
But can we turn a *morally neutral* behavior - using sleep aids 💊😴 - into a moral issue by describing it as harmful? Yes!
Participants moralized sleep aids more when we framed them as causing harm (increasing traffic deaths due to residual drowsiness) 😡
Study 4:
Next we tested causality. Participants read about a health behavior (going to a crowded event while sick) that was described as either harmful or disgusting.
Framing it as harmful → seems immoral 😡
Framing it as disgusting → seems gross 🤢 but not immoral
Studies 1-3:
We found that the more people viewed poor health as *interpersonally* harmful - causing others in one's life to suffer - they more they viewed all kinds of health behaviors as moral issues.
We drew on the Theory of Dyadic Morality, which argues that we condemn acts to the extent they seem harmful.
But “harm” can mean many things. Is smoking wrong because it hurts you (personal harm), others (interpersonal harm), or society (collective harm)?
Why do some health choices seem like moral issues 💉😷 whereas others are personal preferences 🦷🧘?
Our new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that we moralize health behaviors when we see them as causing harm.
doi.org/10.1177/0146...
Nobel prizes are out, did anyone else get honorable mention?
New post about the signals that trigger warnings and safe spaces send to students in SPSP blog👇
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Try out the WCHS here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...
Introducing the Words Can Harm Scale: a measure of the belief that words can cause psychological harm.
Preprint and online assessment in next tweet!
You can read the full preprint here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Thanks to co-authors Payton Jones, Ben Bellet, Rich McNally, and @kurtjgray.bsky.social
