Sanaz Talaifar

Description Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

My department at Imperial College London is hiring! We're looking for scholars who study "inclusivity," broadly defined. Applicants can be from any research area including OB, social psychology, sociology, and entrepreneurship. Deadline Sept 15.

www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissism Support for Donald Trump is linked to darker personality traits, including increased psychopathy and decreased empathy, new research finds. The study also connects conservative political beliefs to lo...

www.psypost.org/trump-suppor... Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissism

Examining the relationship between moral outrage on social media and activism A new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science examines how expressions of moral outrage on social media are linked to online activism, specifically petition-signing behavior.

"Platforms are calibrated to capture attention by amplifying moralized and emotional content. This can have benefits, such as raising awareness of injustices by propagating expressions of outrage," explains @stefanleach.bsky.social phys.org/news/2025-05...

50 years ago, film director John Cassavetes observed that lifestyle is a driver of social division. Our article suggests that this holds true today. However, we add that lifestyle divisions are not random but cluster (and are perceved to cluster) around political identities.

We find that liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life, but not as differently as people think. (Observers tended to overestimate lifestyle differences between liberals and conservatives in the same community).

We quantified the association between political identity and 61 social, movement, work, and leisure behaviors collected from smartphone sensors/logs and ecological momentary assessments in a sample of students on a college campus.

Now out in JPSP (open access paper):
"Lifestyle Polarization on a College Campus: Do Liberals and Conservatives Behave Differently in Everyday Life?"
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

w/ @dianamejordan.bsky.social, Sam Gosling, and Gabriella Harari

🚨🚨 I’m looking for a postdoctoral fellow to join my lab at Harvard's Psychology Department starting Fall 2025 🚨📣

Please share widely and spread the word to interested candidates! 🧵

🗓 Application review begins April 30

Apply here: rb.gy/k7q9kf (1/2)

osf.io/preprints/ps...

This work suggests that to understand authoritarian movements upending the economic, social, and political fabric of countries around the world, researchers have much to learn from the inherently quotidian—the stuff of everyday life.

Regarding the most important individual behaviors for predicting authoritarianism, Facebook app use was king. It comprised 5 out of the 10 most important behaviors overall. It was also the most important type of app use, and app use was the most important type of sensor modality.

AGGRESSION & EMOTIONALITY: Authoritarians used positive and negative emotion words more often and with more variability, and they used anger- and death-related words more. The exception was anxiety! Those LOW on authoritarianism used more anxiety words.

AUTHORITY & HIERARCHY (2): Gender-related hierarchy seemed to play a particularly important role here. Individuals high on authoritarianism used more male references (e.g., he, him, man), suggesting a more male-dominated social circle and/or a focus on men and masculinity.

AUTHORITY & HIERARCHY (1): Authoritarians’ language revealed a preoccupation with status (e.g., using more clout-related words) and a tenuous relationship with submission (e.g., greater variability in assent-related words).

[In the beeswarm plots on the right, positive SHAP values indicate the behavior predicts higher authoritarianism; negative SHAP values indicate the behavior predicts lower authoritarianism].

LIMITED EXPOSURE: Authoritarians have an active but constrained social circle (e.g., receiving more text messages from fewer numbers), an interest in familiar pop culture (e.g., listening to Europop music), and a focus on intergroup dynamics (e.g., “they”-related language).

Behavioral patterns reflecting limited exposure to unknown people/places/cultures were most important for predicting individuals' authoritarianism, followed by preference for simple information, respect for authority & hierarchy, and tendency towards aggression & emotionality.

Everyday behavioral patterns measured with smartphones predicted individuals’ authoritarianism twice as accurately as demographics (i.e., age, gender, education, nationality).

We used prior literature to derive theory-informed behaviors that a) reflect authoritarians’ key psychological attributes, and b) can be measured with smartphones sensors/logs (i.e., app usage, keyboard typing, music listening, unlocking/locking, calling/texting, GPS location).

🚨New Preprint (wish it were less timely)🚨
We map everyday behavioral patterns of authoritarians using smartphone data, providing an updated portrait of authoritarianism in the digital age. w/ Timo Koch, @clemensstachl.bsky.social, @dracek.bsky.social, Ramona Schoedel, et al
osf.io/preprints/ps...

This summer, UCL Computer Science and Imperial College Business School will host the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) – London from June 16–25, 2025!

Please apply! The summer school is free, and I'll be giving a talk! For details and application info: lnkd.in/ezurESRd

Sanaz Talaifar: smart phone passive sensing study: Liberals have less fun than conservatives (they are on social media lot...). Also, people vastly overestimate daily routine differences among lib vs conservatives
#spsp2025 #comppsych

Thanks for your questions! More details in the pre-print: osf.io/k4d5q_v1. We didn't measure wellbeing in our study, but liberals tended to engage in behaviors that prior research has found to be less beneficial for wellbeing, a finding we are following up on. The "fun" comment was meant as a joke.