Adi Wiezel, Ph.D.

Her session is today from 12:45-1:45 pm in the exhibition hall at poster [121]. I’m sure she’d be delighted if you stopped by to say hi!

And, quick plug for Elon University undergraduate student Dani Rudd’s poster on a theoretical approach to thinking about authenticity in human-AI relations. This is Dani’s first #SPSP2026. She was in my Careers in Psychology class last Fall and is looking at PhD programs and lab manager positions!

It is worth noting that race, sex, sexual orientation, & political affiliation were measured in a dichotomous way.

There was also a main effect of political affiliation, such that liberals were more active than conservatives—for every 1 unit increase in liberalism, activism increased by 5%.

Giovanina Kelly presented cool work on the average daily trajectories of activists age 18-24 before, during, & after the 2024 US elections, finding that activism decreased after elections, but was not further moderated by participant race, sex, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. #SPSP2026

Kayley Okst presented a mega-study testing the efficacy of 10 expert-crowdsourced behavioral interventions for increasing voter registration. Although many interventions increased intentions, trust, efficacy, & registration website visits, none actually increased registration or turnout. #SPSP2026

(2) People seem to value socio-emotional maturity more in prestigious leaders, and less in dominant leaders; but people do *not* seem to differ in the extent to which they value cognitive maturity in dominant versus prestigious leaders.

Our #SPSP2026 symposium organizer, Kristina Wald, also presented some interesting work on people’s evaluations of maturity and preferences for maturity in leaders, finding that (1) maturity seems to have two dimensions: socio-emotional (e.g., emotion regulation) and cognitive (e.g., wise judgment).

Interestingly, this perception of dominant leaders’ reduced likelihood of success was also associated with *reduced* action tendencies in participants, including in terms of voting prioritization and of donation support for (non-dominant) candidates.

During our “what do we value in leaders” symposium at #SPSP2026, Danbee Chon presented interesting results suggesting that liberals underestimate the success/electability of dominant leaders, a result that held across organizational & political primary (i.e., same/in-party evaluation) contexts.

This looks like a great session, and I look forward to hearing these talks!

My pleasure! It was a great talk about interesting work.

This was especially true for participants who perceived greater electoral threat, which further interacted with partisan strength. Specifically, although strong partisans were more likely to speak out under lower threat, they were especially *un*likely to speak out under high threat.

A day 2 presentation at #SPSP by @jules-oberschulte.bsky.social suggested that both in pilot studies covering fictitious political scenarios an in the 2024 US elections, participants were less likely to share in-party criticism.

Interestingly, comments coded as “closed-minded” were more likely to receive a reply (42% to closed-minded, vs. 36% non closed-minded); and these replies were themselves more likely to be closed-minded (17% vs. 7% non-closed-minded replies) and tended to express disagreement.

In an interesting Day 2 talk at #SPSP, Michalis Mamakos showed data suggesting that across 250 million comments from over 10,000 subreddits, of those covering political topics, about 13% could be coded as “closed-minded”, but only 3% covering non-political topics could be coded as “closed-minded.”

Interestingly, & inconsistent with predictions, there was little ideological variability in engagement based on the moral foundations represented in the memes, with the exception of authority-based memes—which showed fewer engagement differences between liberals of high & of low outparty animosity.

Day 2 of #SPSP also featured an interesting talk by Jordan Thompson, finding that participants with high levels of outparty animosity were more engaged with online political memes than those with lower levels of outparty animosity, including in terms of the intent to like and share those memes.

Some of this disjunction seems to be driven by the fact that people who are more politically extreme are more likely to post, whereas moderates are less likely to post—a trend that holds across behavioral trace data (tweets across 10 years), 3 experiments, and data collected in 40 countries.

During Day 2 of #SPSP, @crobertson500.bsky.social presented interesting work suggesting that although people overwhelmingly think (blue dots) that negative content (seen in red rows) goes viral online, they actually *want* (orange dots) positive content (seen in green rows) to go viral online.

Quick clarifier: in the talk, as I understood it, “overestimate” meant estimates relative to ANES items — not downplaying the very real harms of racism. The interesting part is why perceptions of the past may differ from the recorded attitudes of the time.

These data don’t speak to the reasons behind this; but future studies aim to investigate whether this discrepancy intensifies under threat, given that temporal appraisal theory suggests that the derogation of the past may be used to enhance perceptions of present progress (in a motivated way).

Samuel Arnold presented interesting data at the #SPSP polipsy precon showing that U.S. Prolific participants overestimate past prejudice against Black Americans relative to actual levels of historical prejudice per ANES data; discrepancies increased as participants estimated further back in time.

Additionally, some experimental data seemed to suggest that potential voters prefer leaders who use “affirmational” versus “negational” ‘we’ statements.

Interestingly, some follow-up correlational data suggested that the use of “affirmational” ‘we’ statements were more associated with electoral success, whereas the use of “negational” ‘we’ statements were more associated with electoral competitiveness.

(2) Republicans were about 3.3 times as likely to use “negational” ‘we’ messages in campaigns than Democrats.

(1) Democrats were about 2.8 times as likely to use “affirmational” ‘we’ messages in campaigns than Republicans, and…

Using a coding procedure that implemented the ChatGPT API in R to analyze the ingroup and outgroup-focused language across a particularly robust set of campaign messages from five data sources covering emails, campaign speeches, as well as videos and transcripts, results suggested that…

Specifically, this work investigated campaigns’ use of two different conceptualizations of “we”: (1) “affirmational” ‘we,’ which defines the ingroup in terms of shared values, goals, and traits, and (2) “negational” ‘we,’ which defines the ingroup in terms of opposition/contrast to the outgroup.

Another impressive data blitz at the #SPSP political psychology preconference came from @hwaldfogel.bsky.social who investigated how Democrats and Republicans define what “we” means in campaign messaging.

Similarly, although purity of body and sexuality was associated with conservatism, purity of the natural environment was associated with liberalism.

Noah Laskey suggests this work poses interesting questions for why liberals and conservatives might apply these foundations to different contexts.