Aleks Ksiazkiewicz

Working on political psychology research with a focus on East Asia? A new special issue of our journal will center East Asia to broaden the field’s geographic & cultural assumptions. Find the call in the Special Issues section of the link below & consider submitting your work! linktr.ee/POPSjournal

UIUC Political Science is HIRING!

Political behavior, broadly defined at the assistant level. Comparative behavior/psych + REP especially encouraged. It's a great place to work on pol beh/psych and UIUC supports partner hires.

Here is the ad with all the details:
illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Implicit (unintentional) biases related to social categories such as race, gender, and age are often seen as impediments to belonging and success in diverse organizations. Indeed, organizations around the world expend considerable effort and resources to implement educational programs with the stated goal of addressing — and even eradicating — such biases. However, in recent years, implicit bias education has come under scrutiny for several reasons, including via claims that implicit bias (a) is inherently unchangeable, (b) has no real-world analogs, (c) is unrelated to, and takes focus away from, biased behaviors, (d) provides an excuse for discrimination, and (e) is a structural problem and thus requires structural solutions. After refuting these critiques, I introduce the MAIBE checklist to help organizations decide if implicit bias education is worth their investment based on whether it (a) includes measurable benchmarks (rather than assuming success), (b) foregrounds epistemic agency (rather than treating individuals as passive consumers of information), (c) is integrated into a larger toolbox (rather than administered in isolation), (d) is broad (rather than light-touch), and (e) is evidence-based (rather than unscientific). I conclude by calling for extended collaboration between academic psychologists and organizational decision-makers to synergistically improve both basic science and institutional practices.

In this invited piece for PIBBS I argue that implicit bias education is not inherently worthless but often ineffective (counterproductive) in its current form. I offer recommendations to improve it by making it measurable, agentic, integrated, broad, & evidence-based (MAIBE): osf.io/preprints/ps...

We are searching for a new editor/editorial team for Politics and the Life Sciences. Please share with anyone who may have interest!

As APLS Chair I’m happy to answer questions or chat about this! Please reach out if you’re interested, either here or mnbaker@utep.edu

Definitely had this many times as a kid. It’s really good!

In El Paso, 'Uncaged Art' spotlights detained kids' memories of home “These are children imprisoned for weeks and months. They didn’t know their futures. ... But they still created beautiful art."

There’s an art exhibit called Uncaged Art that had made its way around the country over the last 6 years that showcases art made by migrant children. They were kept in a makeshift caged detention center in Texas in 2018. Seems like the appropriate time to share this. www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncn...

Drawings under the headings “Persecution and expulsion from the schools”, “Transports”, and “Topography of Terezin” (the concentration camp nearest Prague)

Drawings under the heading “Living Quarters in the Children’s Dormitory”

Salient as I visited the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague today (a Holocaust memorial). They have a permanent exhibit of children’s drawings from the period.

Since we’re apparently doing this again, let’s talk how Canada set an American steamship on fire and sent it over Niagara Falls, and how that created the legal precedent for when a nation can launch a “preemptive attack.”

Thread!

Congrats, Matt! Well deserved 😄

I’ve got access to 1908-2011, if you’re still looking.

Paper in @pnas.org in which @d-melnikoff.bsky.social and I provide evidence for model-based effects on automatic evaluation. This was a super fun “adversarial” collaboration with 0 adversariality. It may have been nice to be right, but getting it right is nearly as nice: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The Skrmetti decision looks an awful lot like Geduldig v. Aiello (1974), which (obviously wrongly) said that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination. In that case, Congress responded by immediately passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. We need policymakers to step up now.

Text of the AI policy that I include in my syllabus. The short version is that I ask students to be transparent about their AI use and provide guidance for what that means (in terms of sharing prompts, providing citations, etc.)

I include the AI statement below on my syllabus. On written assignments, I also require students to provide an affirmative statement that they either didn't use AI in completing the assignment or that they did with an explanation of how exactly they used it.

New paper in PSPB! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Well, actually, not "new". We first put this paper online way back Dec 2022... in any case, we think it's really cool!

We find that conspiracy believers tend to be overconfident & really don't seem to realize that most disagree with them

This gets papered over as old man yelling at clouds but this is impeachable by itself. Greenland is our ally which has allowed a continual U.S. military presence since WWII, including a vital part of our missile defense and space surveillance. Threatening them is unacceptable.

'We're citizens!': Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren't suspects A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were …

Please highlight this story.

ICE stormed into the wrong house, trashed the place, and made women/girls stand outside in the rain in their underwear. ICE also stole phones, laptops, and cash savings from the family, who moved to OKC two weeks ago.

kfor.com/news/local/w...

"Visionary, rigorous, and collegial." A bit obsequious, but interesting to see. Thanks for the idea!

I also asked it for suggestions on how to write better (increase the sense of urgency, sharpen your call to action, weave in a few human-scale examples, etc.) that were actually pretty useful.

How one Illinois man is studying to be a lawyer – from inside a Minnesota prison "A lot of the time, we are portrayed as people who are just beyond redemption," says Ronald Palm. "But the truth is that some of us just [weren’t] given the chance to excel."

So proud of Ron and all of our EJP students!

www.wbez.org/education/20...

I deliberately leave the last week of my (Political Psych) syllabus open for students to choose topics that they want to hear more about. I'm definitely putting this on the list of options for them to consider on Monday. Thanks for the super interesting work!

It’s a tiny step from “We can revoke your visa/green card for speech we don’t like” to “We can revoke your naturalized citizenship for speech we don’t like,” & if you don’t think that’s coming, I ask you again why you think that & who is going to stop the clearly illegal & unconstitutional things?

Masked plainclothes goons snatching someone who's committed no crime off the street? I'd say we're in the bad place, folks

Canada is a "distraction" until it's really not.

Blame Canada As I noted on Bluesky, many Americans – including me – have tended to treat Donald Trump's comments about annexing Canada as a joke. That attitude is a mistake on our part, but let me explain why we'v...

New post at CAMPAIGN TRAILS explaining why Americans have treated Trump's threats to Canada as a joke and why that's wrong.

campaign-trails.ghost.io/blame-canada/

This is humiliating. This isn't a "disagreement." An unhinged wannabe imperialist wants to take over our closest ally and friend. There should be massive outrage over this and Republicans should be speaking loudly against it. But here one of this administration's "normal" appointees is defending it

Court orders defied.

I know some in media and the legal profession say it's not a Constitutional crisis unless the Supreme Court majority says "you absolutely must do this, there is no legal wiggle room" and the president says "I hereby officially defy that court order," but that bar is too high.

This is just blatant weaponization of executive power. It isn't even attempting to utilize any reasonable understanding of the law.

Strongly endorsed.

I don't care what Khalil said. What matters most here is the state punished him, without charge or trial, for speech. They disappeared him like in the sort of authoritarian country America used to criticize. Anyone adjudicating the content of his speech is missing the point.

👇🎯 The entire ballgame: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Ugh, this is the worst. Opportunities lost that can not easily be regained. And REUs are specifically designed to identify & support the next generation of scientists coming from under-resourced environments, where they might otherwise be missed.