Vukašin Gligorić, PhD

Thank you, @markrubin.bsky.social, for sharing our paper!

Others, please have a look at our paper where we discuss a bias in research of (dis)trust in science!

Screenshot of the OpenMoji project homepage. The text says OpenMoji 16.0.0 Open source emojis for designers, developers and everyone else! with a Search emoji box below and a lot of random emojis scattered on the page.

I don't think this science communication resource gets enough love.

OpenMoji offers 4,000+ free, #opensource emojis (CC BY-SA 4.0), with categories for healthcare, climate, UI...

Challenge: find Greta Thunberg and a Viennese coffee house. ☕

🔗 openmoji.org #SciComm #Design

Image of human face cutout looking toward cityscape silhouette, with "Psychology in Political and Economic Systems" written around the top. Logo credit: Sondos Eatamadi

Thrilled & grateful to launch the Psychology In Political & Economic Systems (PIPES) Lab @NYUAbuDhabi:
tinyurl.com/4dw6h29r
We'll be looking at how phenomena at the societal level (from polarization to extreme inequality) reflect & shape psychological functioning. Stay tuned for research & events!

Over the next couple of years, I’ll be studying how political ideology, intergroup relations, and economic beliefs are shaped by broader societal structures like neoliberalism and neocolonialism.

Excited to see what’s ahead (and if Jennifer regrets her decision)!

✨Who says dreams can’t come true?✨

5 yrs ago, I emailed Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington asking if she'd take me on as a PhD student. She rightly declined.

5yrs later, she is taking me on as a postdoc in Psychology in Political & Economic Systems (PIPES) lab at NYU Abu Dhabi (probably shouldn't have)!

Good question! Yes, that's basically what the graph shows though we got calculations estimated from the mixed model!

Yes Hakan, that's right!

✨On a personal note, this has been the most ambitious and rewarding project I’ve ever led (started in 2022 on the shores of Egypt). Even better, I carried it out with some of my closest and beloved people, and many new colleagues who became friends. Special thanks to Prof. John Jost for co-leading!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

💡Takeaway: global structural inequalities can override the usual ingroup favoritism. Sometimes nations admire powerful outsiders more than their own.
Full paper here 👉 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🔎What did we find?

• Advantaged outgroups = seen as more competent, but less warm.
• Disadvantaged outgroups = less competent, no difference in warmth.
• In poorer & more exploited countries, outgroup favoritism on competence was strongest.

📊Our team of 76 researchers studied 12,339 participants across 45 non-Western countries.
We asked how people stereotype:
• their own nation
• a relatively advantaged outgroup (Western Europeans)
• a relatively disadvantaged outgroup (Western Africans)

🌍Do all nations believe they’re superior—or do some feel inferior?

Western social sciences claimed the first. But Fanon & Memmi argued colonization by the West left many in the Global South with colonial mentality—internalized oppression.

🧵Findings from our 45-country study:

This also marks the last empirical chapter of my PhD with great supervisors Gerben Van Kleef & Bastiaan Rutjens! 🎓

For those unable to access the paper behind the paywall, I uploaded the free preprint version (link should be working soon):

🔗 osf.io/v6pbg_v1

Speaking of systemic issues, with science cuts looming across the West (UK, US, NL), what can scientists do? Petitions/statements have their place, but can’t match the bargaining power of organized workers. Join a union, talk to colleagues, and organize to defend science 🚩

More broadly, we argue that low trust in scientists goes beyond political ideology. Neoliberal policies (privatization, commercialization) have damaged science. Corporations with vested interests (e.g., tobacco, climate change) and the "publish or perish" mentality don't help.🏢

Furthermore, we tested interventions to boost conservatives' trust in scientists (N = 7,800). Unfortunately, none worked. This raises concerns about the effectiveness of short, one-time interventions in increasing trust in science. 😕

In our registered report (two years in the making ⏳), we find that liberals trust scientists more, not just in fields like climate change, public health, & social sciences, but also in neuroscience, biology, & nuclear science.

Political ideology and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour In this Registered Report, Gligorić et al. find that liberals in the USA tend to have higher trust in most scientists compared with conservatives. However, they find no evidence that a series of inter...

🎉 Just published in Nature Human Behavior 🎉

Do liberals or conservatives in the US trust scientists more? You might assume it's liberals, but studies often fail to consider the diversity of scientific disciplines! 🔬

nature.com/articles/s41...

[1/6]🧵

Excellent study by @vukasin.bsky.social (2025) finds US liberals trust scientists more than conservatives across all fields. Despite generally high trust levels overall, the gap is largest for climatologists. 5 interventions failed to increase trust, suggesting attitudes resistant to interventions 🧪

Registration for symposium Social Sciences and the System: Challenging or Upholding the Status Quo? It is widely acknowledged that neoliberal capitalism has led to rampant socioeconomic inequalities, wars, and ecological crise...

To academics in Netherlands (and especially Amsterdam), we are organizing a symposium *Social sciences and the System: Challenging or Upholding the Status Quo* that includes John Jost, Enzo Rossi and Marija B. Petrović on 18th February in Amsterdam!

register here:
forms.gle/NSzoNxu2EKMf...

Psychological stimulus sets and datasets

Directory of free, open psychological datasets

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

The role of worldviews, radicalization risk factors, and personality in harassment of scientists - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - The role of worldviews, radicalization risk factors, and personality in harassment of scientists

You can read the full paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heightened psychopathy, cynicism, and threat perception linked to harassment of scientists New research indicates that distrust in scientists, perceiving them as threats, and personality traits like narcissism and psychopathy contribute to the harassment of scientists.

Our latest research on who is likely to harass scientists has been featured in two recent interviews! 📰✨

📌 PsyPost: Psychopathy, cynicism & threat perception linked to harassment www.psypost.org/heightened-p...

📌 Folia: Who is behind hate mail to scientists? www.folia.nl/en/wetenscha...

Thanks Samuel!

We also measured behaviors - voodoo doll, petition signing and donation.

Started as a Master's student project and now we're here! Kudos to all the collaborators and supervisors on this one. Happy to say it's my fourth PhD project that is published 🎊

Across two studies (N=749), we investigated a number of predictors. We found that science cynicism (belief that scientists are incompetent and corrupt) drives harassment of scientists. Perceiving scientists as threatening and dark personality traits also play a role!👇🏼

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the past several years, and especially in the first few years of COVID-19, scientists have experienced harassment - from unwanted emails and doxxing to death threats and even lynching attempts. But who wants to harm scientists? Find out in our new paper just published in Scientific Reports! 🎉💥✨

So sing, thou psychological science! And celebrate your children's null results because your children are children no more

I have the right to shitpost because I have no followers (yet)

In that particular project, we found no experimental effects. Naive and puzzled, we didn't know what was going on. As we learned about the replication crisis, we always had a soft spot for replicating this project. Six years later, our dreams came true - we did a replication and found no effects.