Clara Pretus

Submissions are OPEN for the 2026 APS Annual Convention in Barcelona, Spain! #APS26BCN

Submit your research by 5 December
www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

US to rewrite its past national climate reports US President Donald Trump's administration is revising past editions of the nation's premier climate report -- its latest move to undermine the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.

The Trump administration has announced that the US will rewrite past climate reports, in a clear attempt to erase scientific history and undermine the consensus on human-caused climate change.

🚨📄 Now accepted at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology!

Why do some people turn to extreme views after being excluded? Most studies focus on personal rejection, but what happens when it’s your group that’s rejected?

We conducted a study with over 1,200 UK residents.👇

How do we work out what the best course of action is when facing multiple choices?

We can adopt three perspectives—pragmatic, hedonic or moral—argue @clarapretus.bsky.social and @jayvanbavel.bsky.social, and our preferences may look very different depending on the one we take:

buff.ly/t6o8N8f

Jay and I wrote about our latest publication on how the brain processes moral evaluations compared to pragmatic and hedonic ones for Psyche Magazine.

@jayvanbavel.bsky.social

psyche.co/ideas/there-...

La neurociencia de la desinformación ¿Cómo decide nuestro cerebro si compartimos o no desinformación? Una investigación reciente relacionada con los circuitos neuronales sugiere que la desinformación cumple una función social, y que compartirla nos reafirma como miembros de un grupo.

Un estudio del equipo de la neurocientífica @clarapretus.bsky.social sugiere que la desinformación cumple una función social, y que compartirla nos reafirma como miembros de un grupo. Mira:

Adverbs pave the road to hell

La neurociencia de la desinformación ¿Cómo decide nuestro cerebro si compartimos o no desinformación? Una investigación reciente relacionada con los circuitos neuronales sugiere que la desinformación cumple una función social, y que comp...

En mi nuevo artículo en @es.theconversation.com explico cómo escaneamos el cerebro de un grupo de simpatizantes de extrema derecha para ver qué ocurría cuando decidían si compartir o no desinformación partidista.

theconversation.com/la-neurocien...

🌍 We are launching a new #ManyLabs!!! Join the Heat & Cognition project! We're studying how extreme heat affects human thinking, social behavior & well-being — globally.
Contribute & co-author:
🔗 Info: heatandmind.wordpress.com
📋 Sign up: www.soscisurvey.de/HeatandCogni...
#EnvironmentalPsychology

Our paper in Nature (@mkwittmann.bsky.social et al.): the brain does not only process the *identity* of a person but primarily our *relationship* to them. Even on a neural level, who someone is *in relation to others* is key. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #neuroskyence

In a new set of studies, we experimentally increase will to fight and justification of violence with short AI-generated messages. 👇🏼

In a new set of studies, we experimentally increase will to fight and justification of violence with short AI-generated messages. 👇🏼

I am excited to announce that we are launching a new CENTER FOR CONFLICT & COOPERATION @ NYU @newyorkuniversity.bsky.social

See our vision and research team here: www.centerconflictcooperation.com

Sign up for our newsletter here: jayvanbavellab.substack.com

Please spread the word or reach out!

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Plus PhD positions for April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky

We had to re-start the process after our preferred candidate withdrew. Info 👇.

Interested in group discrimination?

We developed a new interactive task to study the effects of personal and group discrimination.

RateME is opely available on our Lab's Github and can be implemented on Qualtrics or as an fMRI task.

Check out our new study & try it out yourself! ✨️

Thanks to our collaborators Boryana Todorova @todorova.bsky.social & Scott Atran!

Interested in group discrimination?

We developed a new interactive task to study the effects of personal and group discrimination.

RateME is opely available on our Lab's Github and can be implemented on Qualtrics or as an fMRI task.

Check out our new study & try it out yourself! ✨️

Community notes increase trust in fact-checking on social media Abstract. Community-based fact-checking is a promising approach to fact-check social media content at scale. However, an understanding of whether users tru

New study finds that crowdsourced fact-checking (e.g. community notes) were viewed as significantly more trustworthy than basic misinformation flags by individuals across the political spectrum.
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... #MisinfoResearch

Read the NYPD’s Mangione report the media won't publish Post-Luigi, the "extremist" threat is you

If you’re a social media user who’s expressed anything other than condemnation for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, counterterrorism authorities might consider you an “extremist.”
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/post-luigi...

Sharing intentions in survey experiments predict actual behavior on social media

Figure 1

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Self-reported sharing intentions of low-quality news in surveys are predictive of actual sharing of low-quality news on X, finds @arechar.bsky.social @mmosleh.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social @dgrand.bsky.social doi.org/10.31234/osf...

The exodus from X/Twitter has finally started, but maybe Twitter should have died a long time ago?

Our new research published today shows how political abuse on X is a global, widespread, and cross-partisan phenomenon.

Out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Key results🧵

Scholars argue whether rightists or extremists are more prone to conspiracies. A new analysis across 77 samples (and 18 countries) concludes "there is no single functional form" of the ideology-conspiracy relationship.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

#socialpsych #psychscisky #polisky

Gone Too Far Elite Radicalization Hebel-Sela Aldar Orian Harel Political Psychology

Political hope, anyone? When are leaders go fascist, previous supporters of those leaders actually go less fascist.
See our registered-report longitudinal study, led by @shirahebelsela.bsky.social, Lee Aldar, and @taloharel.bsky.social, with Boaz Hameiri and Eran Halperin, here:
tinyurl.com/3py5n6vb

The relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs and political violence | HKS Misinformation Review Recent instances of political violence have prompted concerns over the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs and violence. Here, we examine the relationships between beliefs in various conspi...

"conspiracy theory beliefs that are more “fringe,” held by smaller groups of homogenous people, are likely to be more strongly correlated with (support for) violence than beliefs in more popular theories."
misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-...

Did the Roll-Out of Community Notes Reduce Engagement With Misinformation on X/Twitter?

Figures 1 & 2

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Figure 5

The introduction of Community Notes on X did not reduce engagement with misinformation posts on X, with Community Notes possibly being too slow to reduce engagement in the early stages of viral diffusion, finds Chuai et al. doi.org/10.1145/3686...

Does participating in collective action moralize one's attitudes over time, and if so, how?

Happy to share that our paper is now out in JPSP! With Martijn van Zomeren, Roberto González, Ernestine Gordijn, Pia Carozzi, Michal Reifen Tagar, Belén Álvarez, Cristián Frigolett, and Eran Halperin. (1/9)

Our paper on emotional contagion in a collective ritual is now officially out in the American Journal of Human Biology. Using wearable GPS and electrodermal activity monitors, we track the spread of emotional arousal in the context of a religious procession.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Can we reduce polarization with empathy? Just published a new (replication) study with @mrooduijn.bsky.social and Matthijs Gillissen showing that different components of empathy have quite different effects [1/5] www.cambridge.org/core/journal...