Thekla Morgenroth

Come be my colleague! careers.purdue.edu/job/Departme...

🚨 LGBTIQ+ Research Across the Globe Pre-conference at #SPSP2026

Come participate in small group discussions and networking opportunities designed to spark collaborations across borders!

Submit your abstract by 23 Oct. Our goal is to have representation across all continents!

ow.ly/xPHL50X68mH

New paper! "Reviewing Research on Transgender and Nonbinary People in Social Psychology: Insights and Future Research Directions" With the magical @kirameans.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

📣 Call for unpublished studies on discrimination of bisexual people!

⬇️ Please see the full call below

We are very grateful for all contributions!

#SocialPsych #PsychSciSky

The Mistake We Always Make When Talking About Women, By A Psychologist Why are debates about women’s rights so hard to resolve? New research shows how morality, not policy, shapes the fight over women’s bodies.

Nice coverage of our recent work on harm-based moral arguments about women's bodily autonomy! @nadirafaber.bsky.social, @shellkryan.bsky.social, @abiclick29.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/traver...

Please consider participating in our research! We're looking for social psychologists (broadly defined) who study gender (broadly defined). Research is (unfortunately) limited to people from/living in US, Canada, Australia, European Economic Area, and UK.

#Psychjobs
My former institution Colby College is hiring a tenure track in intergroup relations, broadly defined & open to many psych areas (not just social). This is my replacement line. I truly enjoyed my time at Colby and it's a great dept! Happy to answer Qs if I can.
apply.interfolio.com/172552

and feel free to chat to my current grad students @kirameans.bsky.social and Heejoo Chung (not on here) to find out what it's like to work with me.

Here is our lab website: tmorgenr.wixsite.com/unicornlab

a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor ALT: a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor

I'll be recruiting a grad student to join the UNICORN lab for Fall 2026! If you know any magical students interested in gender/sex, LGBTQ+ issues, intergroup relations, stereotyping & prejudice, social cognition, feminism, issues of bodily autonomy, or anything else I do, please send them my way!

Check out our new pre-print in which we argue something that might be obvious but doesn't seem to be obvious to everyone: Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) do not simulate human psychology.

"Moral Policing: How Society Justifies Controlling Women’s Bodies": @theklamorgenroth.bsky.social and I have written a short blog piece for @spspnews.bsky.social on our work on bodily autonomy.
spsp.org/news/charact...
#socialpsyc #philsky #moralPhil

Character & Context piece about our work on the moralization of women's bodies: spsp.org/news/charact...

You can email me at tmorgenr(at)purdue.edu

P.S.: Am I a real social psychologist now that I've published in JPSP? 😆

Materials and data Hosted on the Open Science Framework

18/18 Finally: All our materials and data are openly available: osf.io/xkbgh/. Studies 1 and 2a were not preregistered. For all remaining studies, we preregistered hypotheses, sample size, exclusion criteria, measures, and analytic strategy, and report deviations from the preregistrations.

17/n Our studies emphasize how such sex/gender-dependent granting of rights might be justified and psychologically and societally sustained. We hope that our work does not remain the last to shed psychological light on this topic!

16/ Many questions are of course still open and there's a bunch of limitations - but we hope that this is a useful contribution to the literature. Bodily autonomy – a core value in philosophy and human rights – seems to be granted less to women than to men across several domains.

14/n Everyone thought harm-based arguments were the most convincing, regardless of condition. But, in line with our predictions, the relative convincingness of harm (compared to fairness/purity) was increased when talking to the political outgroup. (figure is for Republican participants)

13/n ... the most convincing arguments for their position (pro or anti decriminalization of sex work). Importantly, we told them to either convince a group of fellow Republicans/Democrats, a group of the political outgroup, or a mixed group.

12/n So in the remaining studies, we examined whether people are more likely to use harm-based arguments when talking to a value-based outgroup member. We recruited Democrats who supported the decriminalization of sex work and Republicans that opposed it. We asked them to select...

11/n But why does harm make such a useful strategic tool? We argue that people know that it is the "common ground" they share with outgroups. E.g. someone opposing sex work bc of religious beliefs likely knows that arguments based on religion will not be convincing to non-religious people.

10/n ... I care more about other stuff anyway." So we gave opponents and supporters information either in line or contradicting their views. As expected, people claimed harm was a less important reason for their views when the information was in opposition to their pre-existing views:

9/n ... claims that the decriminalization of sex work increases or decreases harm shouldn't affect the stated importance of harm. But if people use harm strategically, then giving them information that contradicts their views may make them go "actually, harm is not that important to me. ...

8/n Ok, so people don't seem to be accurate in their perceptions of what predicts their views, but we also wanted to show that people use harm _strategically_, i.e. when it benefits them in some way. So in Study 3, we reasoned that if people truly care about harm, giving them information that...

7/n So everyone says harm matters. But does it really? When we measure importance of harm (& other foundations), it doesn't predict opposition. Only importance of fairness and purity are predictive.

6/n In Study 2, we replicated these patterns when asking people directly about harm (& other foundations) and found similar patterns for another topic related to women's bodily autonomy (abortion).

5/n As you can see in the figure, harm was the "common ground" between opponents and supporters - the only foundation that these groups used with similar frequency.

4/n In Study 1, we focused on the decriminalization of sex work and asked people to list their reasons for support/opposition. We then coded responses using moral foundations theory as a framework (given it's popularity, it might be a good proxy for lay conceptualizations of morality).

3/n Importantly, we don't argue that harm doesn't matter or that harm-avoidance never underlies people's views. Indeed, we believe that people use harm strategically exactly BECAUSE it is something everyone can agree is bad and should be avoided.