Raihan Alam

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review.

Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Viewpoint diversity and its limits Affirmative action for iconoclasts?

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/viewpoint-...

Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Do you think giving folks a basic income would reduce crime?

Think again.

"We estimate precise zero effects [of basic income] on criminal perpetration."

every time I see an A-list actor in an ad for some slot machine phone game, I think about how Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation doing advertisements is framed as basically the highest form of humiliation an actor could go through.

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:

Celebrating prosocial behaviour on International Volunteer Day - Nature Human Behaviour Humans are a social species, and one expression of this is prosocial behaviour: we often behave in ways that do not directly benefit ourselves, but others. On International Volunteer Day, we are launching a Collection on prosocial behaviour to celebrate its importance as a core human behaviour.

Happy #InternationalVolunteerDay! To celebrate, we launch a new Collection on prosocial behaviour, which explores the science behind it and its real-world impacts. Read our Editorial: https://www.nature.c... and the Collection: https://www.nature.c...

New paper alert!

"Public Speakers With Nonnative Accents Garner Less Engagement" -- now out in Psych Science!

This is my first graduate student's first first-author paper (and it was her first-year project).

Short THREAD on the results:

We should probably be placing incarcerated people in prisons closest to their homes.

Why?

Assigning individuals to prisons closer to their home reduces recidivism.

Really?

Yep. Being placed close to one's home increases social contacts that appear to reduce reoffending.

Feels like "missing" is inaccurate. This child was kidnapped by the secret police and is now either a political prisoner or a trafficking victim.

Its not good for democracy! bsky.app/profile/tage...

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

New paper in press at JPSP! An adversarial collaboration focusing on a large-scale test of how strongly implicit racial attitudes predict discriminatory behavior. Pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Moreover, I would argue that three important concepts that are especially poorly captured by standard economic numbers underlie people’s perceptions of affordability: economic inclusion, security, and fairness. By economic inclusion I mean the ability to purchase the goods and services that allow someone to feel like a member in full standing of American society. By security I mean a feeling based not just on current real income, but also an assurance that severe hardship isn’t just a stretch of bad luck away. Lastly I would also argue that perceptions of affordability are often intertwined with perceptions of fairness: people are especially upset about high prices when they feel that they are being taken advantage of.

The Krugman blog today on affordability gets at exactly what I think is happening, and what's missed in the vibecession debates

paulkrugman.substack.com/p/affordabil...

striking that so many cities are seeing parallel homicide declines this year. i have no good explanation

jasher.substack.com/p/the-fbi-wi...

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix.

I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health - Nature A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

"We therefore encourage policymakers to consider designing interventions to maximize reductions in absolute poverty rather than focusing on inequality per se."

Beyond Valence: Arousal as a Core Dimension of Affective Polarization: https://osf.io/5dfbj

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence

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Problems with the so-called gender equality paradox
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/25/p...

Consider the experiences of the last few years. The racial justice movement that peaked in 2020 ended in disappointment and backlash. The Gaza protests provoked intense conflict without delivering clear political or policy victories for their organizers. Maybe most important, Mr. Trump himself is back in the White House, suggesting a futility to opposition and activism among young people who have only ever known him as the central figure in our politics. He first took the oath of office when today's first-year college students were in elementary school. The electoral choices offered to young people are not much better. Given the realities of our dysfunctional two-party system, the only alternative to a Trump-dominated G.O.P. is the Democratic Party, which is dominated by a decadent gerontocracy whose elites were more likely to attend a wedding in the Hamptons than a No Kings protest on the same day.

@brendannyhan.bsky.social is right: young people are reluctant to come to the defense of institutions that have excluded them, ignored them, and crushed their movements

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o...

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025.

US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom.

open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment...The three factors...are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes..."

A theory of stereotype negotiation Inequality is pervasive, challenging people and organizations. Yet we lack a clear picture of how people navigate inequality in everyday social and or…

New paper building a theory of stereotype negotiation. How people don't just let stereotypes happen to them; instead they constantly and actively navigate social impressions and others' evaluations by @cydneydupree.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We spent a year investigating billionaires for @washingtonpost.com.

We found: the wealthiest 100 Americans gave $1.1 billion to influence the 2024 elections — 140x more than they did in 2000. And almost all of that giving boosted Republicans.

washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

Very interesting set of studies about how agreement with punished acts undermines the perceived legitimacy of the punisher. Reminds me a bit of the Mullen & Nadler (2008) study that found that people were more likely to steal a borrowed pen from the researcher after being exposed to an unjust law.

Finally, we discuss the need for research into alternative interventions for fostering legitimacy and compliance that engage with offenders’ moral beliefs directly, potentially restorative justice.

It was an honor to build on classic debates between @lindaskitka.bsky.social and Tom Tyler on procedural justice and moral conviction — debates that also appeared in PSPB!

Moral agreement with the punished act was a much stronger predictor of perceived legitimacy and compliance intentions than information about punisher’s procedural justice reputation. These patterns were also replicated in our sample of criminalized participants.

Across five experiments, we found that punishing morally agreeable acts undermines punisher legitimacy and reduces people's willingness to comply with the law in general. This was also true when we introduced a specific, new law unrelated to the punished act.