Abby Cassario

Plus, something tells me dad would've been more excited to hear about my research 🤷‍♀️

(Yes, I realize I'm very lucky he's intersted in what I do all day!)

One of my dissertation committee members has the same first name as my dad, and I almost emailed my dad instead of my committee member to set up a defense date 😬

It’s incredibly hard to cheer for team USA at the Olympics this year, but my brother cleans Jacob Slavin’s pool and he and his wife have been exceptionally kind to my brother so I’m using this as an excuse to cheer for the men’s hockey team, if nothing else 🤷🏻‍♀️

very cool opportunity!

In academia, class background strongly shapes who advances and who stalls.

Voters See a Middle-Class Lifestyle as Drifting Out of Reach, Poll Finds Concerns about the affordability of education, housing, health care, having a family and retirement are driving economic anxieties, a New York Times/Siena poll found.

Americans are deeply pessimistic about their economic future, driven by financial anxiety among all but the oldest Americans and by a widespread belief that a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for most people, a New York Times/Siena poll found. nyti.ms/4bljYk7

Tillis voted not guilty in Trump's impeachment trial for J6, and against the J6 Commission

abc11.com/post/senator...

www.tillis.senate.gov/2021/5/tilli...

Glad to see the conversation continues to grow and data speak to the enormous class bias that is built into bans on standardized testing, which end up only exacerbating them more.

x.com/garrytan/sta...

For a lot made of young men's gender attitudes, nothing apparent in hostile sexism per the 2024 CES. Much more a party story. And these are likely overestimates since the two items are both agree-disagree and phrased in the same direction.

Psychologically Anchored Social Neuroscience Benefits Policy - J.T. Kubota, M. Welte, J. Cloutier, 2025 Social neuroscience, grounded in social psychological theory, provides policy-relevant insights by identifying mechanisms through which social factors influence...

So honored to join the other exceptional social psych scholars in this forthcoming issue of PIBBS!

🧠📊 Our paper examines how insights from social neuroscience can inform better public policy

@fabbs.org
@spspnews.bsky.social
@sansmeeting.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Awful news. I remember how much these centers meant to UNC's comparative students especially during my time there!

UNC’s CSEEES was such a bright part of my time at UNC. It not only supported my research, but also felt like home. Such a loss for UNC, its students, and Eastern European and Eurasian studies in the US.

Central attitudes in political belief systems are more resistant to change than peripheral attitudes, but not necessarily less amenable to persuasive attempts: https://osf.io/6a8ue

(No knock on the canes. The players actually have gone out of their way to be exceptionally kind to my brother and his coworkers. Just an observation about economic systems.)

My brother cleans pools for a number of the Carolina hurricanes. A Scandinavian hockey mom told him America is the “land of opportunity.” True if you’re a once in a generation hockey player. The rest of us might prefer healthcare…

Just finished my last class of the semester🎉Reminded of how much I love teaching this academic writing class for grad students. We focus on improving our writing but also reducing anxiety and becoming a more consistent & productive writer

Some of the students favorite writing tips/learnings below:

Didn’t expect Italian Christmas cookies to be served at the conference I’m at but I am absolutely here for it 🇮🇹 🎄

An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment

Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects:
-"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size"
-"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant"
academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

Last 10 days to apply~~

#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #devpsyc #AcademicSky

I'm excited to share that I’ll be reviewing PhD applications this cycle for students interested in working with me starting Summer/Fall 2026.

I’m especially looking for applicants excited about research on trust/persuasion, responses to historical harm, addressing inequality, and/or mindsets.

It's hard to express what it meant to watch Maurice, Natalia, Celeste, and Rhea tell their stories—in their own voices—this morning.

The segment revealed a brutal reality: homelessness at this scale isn't about personal failure. It's the result of policy choices and systems built to exploit people.

A glowing white figure stands out among many gray figures connected by lines, symbolizing a unique individual in a network.

New research explores why openness/intellect stands apart from other personality traits. It turns out this trait may be less universal across cultures and rarely targeted for change.

Read more in #PSPR: ow.ly/UGlJ50XqLqS

Join us for two fun days of moral psychology and philosophy!

#MPRG2025

Come work with us @msupsychology.bsky.social!

I promise, we don’t match *all* the time @tedmond.bsky.social

Two great scholars doing work on moral (@drmeltemyucel.bsky.social) & personality (@tedmond.bsky.social) development & change are recruiting PhD students this year @msupsychology.bsky.social!

Your grad office could be across the hall from my office!*

*not necessarily a selling point, just a fact

The welfare state is about dignity, equality, and making people not poor, but as @itsafronomics.bsky.social says/cites here, it’s often also an investment that more than pays for itself

New data, data nerds!

At a time when it’s impossible to take research funding for granted, @ncaluori.bsky.social, Cindel White, and I are humbled to receive support from the @templetonfdn.bsky.social to fund 3 years of cross-cultural research aimed at understanding how people decide who counts as their religious ingroup.

Big shoutout to MSU's email spam filter for blocking emails from my external collaborators, but not actual spam from MDPI journals I get at 2am every night...

My paper “Testing Theories of Threat, Individual Difference, and Ideology” is a winner of the Student Publication Award this year. I’m proud of this one, because it shows that if we ask interesting questions and use rigorous methods, we can contribute to ~science~ even when we’re wrong or 1/2 right!