Benjamin Buttlar

Heute um 12 Uhr startet unsere Kolloquiumsreihe mit einem Vortrag zu Science Slams! #WissKomm #Forschung

Morgen startet wir mit unseren #WissKomm Lunch Talks der @psycomm.bsky.social - wer ist dabei? 🥳

Habt ihr euch den ersten Vortrag unserer #WissKomm Kolloquiums-Reihe schon in den Kalender eingetragen? Seid diesen Freitag dabei, wenn @benjaminbuttlar.bsky.social über das Format Science Slam spricht!
📆 21.11.2025, 12:00 Uhr

Rosi und ich freuen uns schon darauf! Im Science Slam erklären wir, warum wir manchmal bei Entscheidungen, wie etwa beim Fleischessen, hin- und hergerissen sind und was das mit uns macht.

Wenn du mehr über diese Ambivalenz oder Wissenschaftskommunikation im Allgemeinen wissen willst, komm vorbei!

Wissenschaftskommunikation in der Psychologie – von der Forschung bis in die Praxis Wissenschaftskommunikation verbindet Forschung mit der Gesellschaft. Doch was wissen wir in der Psychologie eigentlich darüber, wie Forschung erfolgreich kommuniziert wird – und wie kommunizieren wir sie in der Praxis tatsächlich? In dieser Vortragsreihe geben Expert:innen Einblicke in aktuelle Studien, innovative Formate und konkrete Erfahrungen. Diskutiert werden Trends, Herausforderungen und neue Wege im Dialog zwischen psychologischer Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft.

Ankündigung: Kolloquium Wissenschaftskommunikation #WissKomm
🧑‍🏫 Einblicke in innovative WissKomm-Formate & aktuelle Forschungsthemen
💬 Austausch über konkrete Erfahrungen aus Praxis und Forschung aus Perspektive der Psychologie
📆 3. Freitag im Monat um 12 Uhr

🧵 New paper alert!
People enjoy eating meat but often feel uneasy when being reminded that it comes from animals. To understand how people avoid this conflict, our new study explores how food preparation helps people mentally separate meat from its animal origins. Here’s what we found 👇
1/9

Finally, I want to give a huge thank you to @lenahahn.bsky.social and Monique Chambon, who were instrumental in bringing this paper to life. As always, it was a pleasure working with you!
9/9

If you’re interested in the psychology of eating and animal ethics, check out the full paper published open access in PHAIR, the official journal of the @phair-society.bsky.social hosted by the @psychopengold.bsky.social at the @zpid.bsky.social 👇
phair.psychopen.eu/index.php/ph...
8/9

Thereby, our study shows how food preparation can change how people think and feel about meat, and their willingness to eat it.
This knowledge can inform the design of interventions that encourage people to eat less meat in a way that is psychologically informed and situationally sensitive.
7/9

Here’s what we found 👇
🥩 When the dish was disassembled, people felt less emotionally aroused and less compassionate than when it was whole.
🔥 When the dish was cooked, people felt less compassionate, but also less negative, conflicted, disgusted, and angry, and had a greater desire to eat it.
6/9

So we did! 🧪
We re-analyzed data from 1,189 people (U.S.-representative sample) who each saw one of many meat images varied on two factors:
🥩 Whole vs. disassembled
🔥 Raw vs. cooked
Then we asked about their attitudes and feelings about the presented meat dish and how much they wanted to eat it.
5/9

However, food preparation arguably includes at least two different steps:
🥩 Disassembling (chopping, mincing, etc.)
🔥 Cooking (applying heat)
Surprisingly, past research hadn’t clearly teased apart how each of these steps affects people’s feelings about meat.
4/9

Food preparation helps with this dissociation.
Cooking, chopping, and seasoning can hide reminders like blood or animal body parts — making meat feel less like an animal and more like… food.
3/9

Many people experience meat-related conflict. This has often been discussed in light of the so-called meat paradox: People like eating meat but don’t like harming animals.
One way people avoid this conflict? They dissociate — mentally separating meat from the animal it once was.
2/9

🧵 New paper alert!
People enjoy eating meat but often feel uneasy when being reminded that it comes from animals. To understand how people avoid this conflict, our new study explores how food preparation helps people mentally separate meat from its animal origins. Here’s what we found 👇
1/9

I tried it, and it was a great experience! You've got to check out the work by Helena and her guest writers! See if it's something you'd like as well - you won't be disappointed if you are interested in science and fiction!

🎉👶 Welcome to the last new born in the Open Science effort!
Replication Research is a diamond open access journal dedicated to robust, transparent and reproducible science.

#OpenScience #ScientificPublication #Replication #OpenAccess

Mich beschäftigt schon lange die Frage, wie Klimapolitik so gestaltet werden kann, dass sie zugleich soziale Gerechtigkeit stärkt. #Mobilität spielt dabei eine zentrale Rolle: Sie bestimmt, wer Zugang zu gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe hat – und sie hat Einfluss auf Lebensqualität. (1/X)

This was a true mess with a ton of AI-generated word salad slop being submitted as preprints. The field owes these moderators a huge thanks for all the work and energy! 🙏👏

Do you sometimes feel torn when making decisions, like whether to eat unhealthy food or recycle? This is called felt ambivalence: a psychological discomfort from having mixed feelings about something. Check out our new work to know how people resolve such conflicts: doi.org/10.1016/j.je... 🧠💥 1/10

Nice 🧵 about a brand new paper in our journal! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Big shoutout to my amazing collaborators: Anna Lambrich, Linda McCaughey, and Iris K. Schneider. This work would not have been possible without you. 🙌

The paper is out now in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social . Check it out for more details! 📄🔍10/10

#AcademicSky #PsychSky #DecisionMaking #Ambivalence

📌 TL;DR:
✔️ Info seeking helps to reduce felt ambivalence if the info is clearly positive or negative.
❌ However, this effect is not (only) driven by attitude change.
🔍 Future research should explore how info seeking helps people feel better, not just think clearly about their attitudes. 9/10

So what else might be going on?

We suggest info seeking might also be an emotion-focused coping strategy, helping people manage the discomfort stemming from the conflict, even if it doesn’t resolve the actual attitudinal roots. 8/10

Figure showing that potential ambivalence does not reduce when people seek univalent information, but remains the same. As with felt ambivalence, it increases when people seek ambivalent information.

This supports a core idea in ambivalence research:
People can reduce felt ambivalence through information seeking. But it’s not that simple.
Our data showed that this process can’t be fully explained by the resolution of the attitudinal conflict. 7/10

However, if the additional information is also ambivalent, information seeking may increase felt ambivalence (see the Figure in the previous post). 😬 So: info seeking can help, but only if it brings clarity, not more confusion. ✅❌ 6/10

Figure showing that felt ambivalence reduces when people seek univalent information, but increases when they seek ambivalent information.

What did we find?
When people feel ambivalent about the initial information, they do seek more pieces of information about a stock’s development. This indeed helps reduce their felt ambivalence, but only if the new information is clearly positive or negative (univalent). 5/10

We tackled this gap using a sample-based information seeking paradigm.
In 4 preregistered studies (N = 542; 16,538 decisions), we looked at how people seek information during financial decision-making and how it affects their felt ambivalence towards different stocks. 📊📑 4/10

The problem? Most studies only measure intentions to seek information, rather than actual behavior. So we don’t really know if information seeking works to reduce ambivalence when people make real decisions. 🤔📉📈 3/10