Ben Saunders

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #SocialPsychology

In 2022 book Pillars of Social Psychology, Miles Hewstone contributed

Title?

"Meetings with Remarkable Men: A Fortunate Journey in Social Psychology"

Also: praises Tajfel (ahem).

No mention of Tajfel's treatment of women.

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.

24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

#PsychSciSky #SocialPsychology #PrejudiceResearch

Help me out with stereotype threat

I feel that some of field has moved on, saying it's not real

But multiple meta-analyses show effects. & there's failed replications but not that many?

What's the state of our literature on #StereotypeThreat?

I assume most are NOT note-taking, but a small minority of them do. Still, I’m seeking policies for dealing with this because I’m worried a no laptops policy will invite administrative scrutiny.

Is that your policy or your department’s/school’s? It sounds like admin would go to bat for you if/when students complain. Not sure mine would.

On digital distractions: I’ve tried to increase engagement by using this rubric, and it helps. But what are faculty doing to encourage real note-taking on laptops or via paper-&-pencil, or discourage laptop use altogether?
#AcademicSky
#AcademicChatter
#PsychSky

Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say

Any great policies or best practices for curbing digital distractions? I don’t want to say ‘no laptops,’ but the pseudo note-taking in particular is killing me. #AcademicSky
#PsychSky

Home | AsCollected

Exciting new addition to the AsPredicted and ResearchBox research infrastructure toolbox: AsCollected ascollected.org A platform to document results provenance - where did data come from, who collected it, and who cleaned and analyzed it. So important!

Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People

when i wrote about these folks being segregationists, i was told it was a stretch

if anything, i undersold their venality

Make an effect size prediction!

@jamiecummins.bsky.social and I are replicating Balcetis & Dunning's (2010) "chocolate is more desirable than poop" (Cohen's d = 4.52)

Let us known in the replies what effect size you think we'll find. Details of the study in the thread below.

Over 400 faculty and staff from the #uva College of Arts and Sciences convened for an emergency vote. 97% of eligible voters endorsed a resolution demanding President Mahoney refuse to consider the Trump admin's Compact for Academic Freedom!!

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵

They do not realize this at all or refuse to acknowledge it.

#statistics #mathsky

The Unequal Effects of Unequal Contact: Power, Race, and Social Cohesion in the U.S. Military Salma Mousa* Eddie Yangt May 21, 2025 Abstract The contact hypothesis posits that cooperative, equal contact reduces prejudice. Yet in practice, contact is often unequal — both within the contact setting itself, or because of inherent power imbalances between minority and majority groups. Leveraging rich data from surveys, censuses, and testimonials among servicemembers in WWII and the Vietnam War, we develop and test a theory of unequal contact. For minori-ties, we find that equal contact improves intergroup attitudes, while unequal contact between soldiers and lieutenants sparks backlash effects. For majorities, we find mixed effects: White soldiers respond to equal contact with more support for military integration but less support for Black rights, suggesting that equality may trigger feelings of threat. We add qualitative nuance to these results by digitizing thousands of veteran testimonies from both wars, revealing drastic asymmetric in how White vs. non-White veterans describe their experiences with race within and outside the military. Our results underscore the importance of internal and external power status in determining the effects of contact.

There are reasons for what’s going on with this administration and the military

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

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