Ben Saunders

Labeling immigrants: Examining the effects of labels on associations toward immigrants Immigrants in the United States are often described in the media using a variety of labels (e.g., illegal, authorized). While these labels are connect…

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch

New study: labels used for immigrants matter.

✳️ Quick to associate with "illegal" (vs. "authorized).

✳️ Positive (vs negative) labels ==> more favourable attitudes

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am glad to see this article in print! Here, we build a bridge between institutional theory and the theory of racialized organizations to draw attention to how social interactions provide a dynamic view of racialization in and by organizations. Check it out: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart

Gift article because I encourage everyone to read this account of SEAL Team 6 murdering a group of North Korean fishermen in a failed espionage mission that was hidden from Congress.

On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans To Believe Fraud Accusations - Political Behavior White Americans face a democratic dilemma: remain committed to electoral democracy (which has been historically beneficial for them), or abandon it as non-White groups gain political stature. We argue...

An undergrad RA applicant shared this with me in our interview. Whaaaat?!? She found it on Reddit; I can't wait to show her Google Scholar and PsycINFO.

#academicsky #socialpsychology #prejudiceresearch

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

10 years ago?! Holy smokes.

Trump signs executive order to eliminate cashless bail in Washington Move is an escalation in president’s efforts to take control of law enforcement in the capital city and beyond

*monkey-like shrieking* I CANNOT.

The PROGRESS we've made in finally getting cash bail removed from the criminal justice systems in some places, only to have---- I'mma shut up before I end up on a list but UGH.

Cash. Bail. Makes. No. Sense. And. Is. Unfair.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I wrote a short companion piece to our new paper about personal responsibility narratives, how pervasive they are, and how important psychology can be as a discipline in helping people reject narratives that people get what they deserve.

go.nature.com/4fOeWNn

The Racist Foundation of the Big Lie of a Stolen Election New research shows how racist beliefs enable lies about voter fraud to spread.

Two troubling new studies find that lies about the 2020 election tapped into racist attitudes and white America’s long-standing fear of a real multiracial democracy. Read about the studies here: bit.ly/3Jqxp6A

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

I debated writing this. It can feel tempting, upon encountering yet another instance of this administration’s racism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet we have to write it down, if for nothing else, so those who come after us know we were against it.

Fascinating work by Deven Carlson, @t-h-a-d.bsky.social, James Carter, @rachelmarisa.bsky.social, Vitali Radsky, and Andrew McEachin on both the potential of school choice for the purpose of desegregation and the disappointing reality that most school choice systems tend to exacerbate segregation

here:

I love how accurately describing actually existing conservatism makes one sound totally unhinged and the people who get punished for this are not conservatives but the accurate describers.

As a friend once told me, the past few years of punditry can be summarized as college educated white pundits telling college educated black pundits that they know more about working class black people than them

Vibe policy
Vibe evidence
Vibe data
Vibe economics
Vibe "journalism"

Malevolence of modern conservatism

nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

#PrejudiceResearch #SocialPsychology #PsychSciSky

Large meta-analysis finds global #sexism is declining over time.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

(hmm, wonder if this will reverse soon, given, you know, modern in 2025?)

Statistical critique of the p-curve (in JASA)

#psychscisky
#socialpsych
#cogpsych

Just re-upping this, because allegedly non-opinion news reporting like this helps power things like Trump deploying ICE to the National Mall.

Of COURSE people think crime is always up if articles on epic DECLINES race to make it clear you should "STiLl bE ScAReD!" w confusing frames.

Homeland Security removes age limits for ICE recruits to boost hiring for Trump deportations The Department of Homeland Security has removed age limits for new hires at the agency responsible for immigration enforcement

Creating a Gestapo filled with child labor is a perfect expression of GOP ideology.

the most important part of this story is not that US diplomats asked if nonwhites qualify for Trump's South Africa refugee program but that Spencer Chretien--a high ranking appointee in Trump's State Department and former Associate Director of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025--answered NO

This administration is more openly racist in policy than described by even the most supposedly pessimistic accounts from leading writers predicted but the media remains reluctant to forthrightly describe it as white nationalist.

40 years ago, Philadelphia police bombed this Black neighborhood on live TV : Code Switch We're looking back on the day a Philadelphia police department helicopter dropped a bomb on a rowhouse in a middle-class neighborhood. Even though that bombing and the fire it set off killed eleven pe...

"the police dept of the 5th largest city in the country at the time, bombed and destroyed an entire neighborhood... on live television... why did something this big disappear?"

"it's the American way...abject ugliness against Black people gets pushed to the margins."

www.npr.org/2025/05/07/1...

“Me-searchers” study topics directly or indirectly relevant to themselves—such as social groups they belong to—and are often stigmatized as being more biased (though sometimes more informed) than those researching topics unrelated to their own experience. This study explores how queer and straight researchers are perceived when studying anti-queer bias or other topics through three pre-registered experiments (N = 823). When both studied anti-queer bias, the queer me-searcher was perceived as more biased, and the straight researcher was perceived as less informed than identical (straight and queer) researchers studying a different topic. Target researchers motivated by social justice (vs. theoretical) implications were also perceived as more biased. Crucially, we identified and tested three conceptual accounts about why and how me-searchers are stigmatized. Supporting the existence of me-search stigma, our results suggest that not only me-searchers but also allied researchers are stereotyped when studying prejudice and discrimination."

"Me-Search"

New study by @eomeral.bsky.social and colleagues investigates bias against “me-searchers...researchers whose work is directly or indirectly relevant to their own identities or experiences."

Open Access: doi.org/10.1177/0146...

American Political Science Review (2019) 113, 4, 1012-1028 doi: 10.1017/S0003055419000340 © American Political Science Association 2019 Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot RYAN D. ENOS Harvard University AARON R. KAUFMAN New York University, Abu Dhabi MELISSA L. SANDS University of California, Merced iolent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we alyze measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles riot - one of the mosthigh-profile events of political violence in recent American history — that occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.

In the modern era, even “riots” generate support, not backlash

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

🧠 Out now: Handbook of Experimental Social Psychology, edited by Chadly Stern

FREE content: doi.org/10.4337/9781...

More information: www.e-elgar.com/shop/isbn/97...

🔔 Mentioned in www.choice360.org/choice-pick/... @choicereviews.bsky.social

#Psychology #PoliticalScience #SocialPsychology

The Handbook of Social Psychology | Open Publishing <p style=

That the The Handbook of Social Psychology is open-access and free-&-accessible to everyone might change the way I teach Social at every level. Organize content around these entries and add supplemental ones as needed.

#SocialPsychology #AcademicSky

openpublishing.princeton.edu/projects/the...

Our Annual Review of Sociology article on conceptualizing and measuring structural racism is now available.

Get it while studying racism is still legal. @tyson-brown.bsky.social @pahoman.bsky.social

(also, lots of great articles are in this volume).

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Tragic news. I didn’t know Sam well, but in a brief exchange I had with him about applying to graduate school (~25 years ago) he was more encouraging than just about anyone.

Shout out to the undergrad social psych student who approached me in the subway station to tell me 4/10 people believe they have an Olympic ability as an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. 👍🏾💪🏾

In an extraordinary display of public support, heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers from all over Europe and Canada are posting in support of Ukraine in response to the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Zelenskyy, and Vance.