Dan Berry

Scientists Discover Gene Responsible For Eating Whole Goddamn Bag Of Chips

Scientists Discover Gene Responsible For Eating Whole Goddamn Bag Of Chips theonion.com/scienti...

Replicate the spotlight effect studies (aka Barry Manilow t-shirt studies)?

If you are applying to a PhD, don't use an LLM in composing your proposal.

If you are doing a PhD, don't use an LLM to do the writing and reading and thinking for you.

Sorry, I am going to die on this hill.

As I detailed in WHITE FLIGHT, segregationists in Atlanta absolutely loved public services -- buses and trolleys, parks and pools, golf courses and tennis courts, etc. -- right until they were forced to desegregate and "stolen" from them. They abandoned them and built up private alternatives.

New paper

Terrorism threat predicts conservative reactions, via anger (not fear)

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

I wonder, is this the "new conservatism"?

That is, in the past, might rightward shifts been more fear-based, but are now more anger-based?

@johnjost.bsky.social, any thoughts?

Students, faculty, and staff fought to fully fund the CSU, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in state support. But now CSU management is breaking its promise by withholding agreed-upon raises, cutting jobs, and continuing to raise tuition. This is an insulting betrayal.

From a paper I just read: the effect of worship attendance on one's willingness to pay higher tax so everyone can have better health care across nations. Note in most nations, the association is positive, though mostly non-significant. Just in the USA where the association is negative & significant.

Our oscillations consensus paper is finally out as a preprint 🤩 thanks to everyone involved
arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639

With more opportunities for diverse interactions, little is known about how social interactions involving people of different socioeconomic status (SES) may unfold. We investigated social-attunement patterns in dyadic interactions involving SES. Unacquainted adults recruited from a community in the United States interacted with similar-or-different-SES partners in the lab ( N = 130 dyads). Attunement was assessed throughout the interaction by examining physiological linkage —how much a person’s physiological change is predicted by another’s physiological change over time. Overall, low-SES participants showed stronger physiological linkage—indicating greater attunement—to partners across SES. Participants also appeared more comfortable when interacting with low-SES partners. There were no SES differences in dominance during the conversation. After the interaction, participants reported liking similar-SES partners more than different-SES partners. These patterns suggest that during interactions, lower-SES individuals are more other-focused than high-SES individuals, and in-group preference prevails. We note limitations in the racial representation of our sample.

Socioeconomic Status in Social Interactions

"Low-SES individuals exhibited greater attunement to others and elicited greater comfort in others than high-SES individuals, but impressions were formed in line with homophily effects."

doi.org/10.1177/0956...

#SocialPsyc #Sociology

Unionize, unionize, unionize. Even if they pay you well. Even if they are elite. Unionize.

I don’t know how much time I have spent in class professing that Miley is one of the greatest Millennial vocal talents. It’s never come up in student evals, but it’s a lot of time.

If we want men to be less lonely, we should start by socializing them in boyhood to be part of a shared project of care. Give them dolls, toy kitchens, and tea sets. Ask them to help care for younger children. Expect them to clean up after themselves. Let them feel the work and value of care. 1/

I had a skeet break containment, so if you’re new here, please take a moment to JOIN THE UNION!

United Campus Workers of Virginia (UCWVA) at UVA welcomes all faculty, staff, and student-workers as the local chapter of the union serving all Virginia public colleges and universities

ucwva.org

The UVA Faculty Senate has voted to approve a resolution of No Confidence in the Board of Visitors

University leaders who do not speak up for higher education and for faculty cannot expect faculty to do media interviews on controversial topics. My own recommendation is that no junior faculty in the country should do any interviews on any controversial topic in this environment.

Biked every day to work from 2009-2018 and never bought a new one after it was stolen from my front porch.

Jim Sidanius, Trailblazer in Social Dominance Theory, Added to SPSP Heritage Wall

#SocialPsychology #PoliticalPsychology #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky

Great to see Jim Sidanius get this honour.

What an apt descriptor: #TrailBlazer

The reason @abigailspanberger.com is running a winning campaign is she outperforms the other side in every aspect of campaigning daily. She outworks them by showing up, listening & connecting.
Yes, she has a fundraising lead *and* she also has an even more impressive advantage in retail campaigning.

"In addition to the 24 minimum credits during the fall and spring, instructors who are on a 12-month contract must teach six credits in the summer." WUT.

Father’s Day show in the rain 🤘🎸

Chewy training for dog sports….

A screenshot of the APA division 8 email encouraging individuals to attend the division's invited talks on August 8th. At 11:30 AM Mountain Time, Dr. Catherine Wall will be presenting her talk "Examining the broader implication of research on transgender and gender diverse issues."

One month left! Who is coming to my invited talk at APA? #APA2025

A *huge* problem. It also includes search committee positions, review requests, letters of recommendation, P&T reviews (so, so many of these post tenure)—it goes on and on. And the social penalties for women saying no are so dramatically higher than when men say no.

I’m convinced there are about 10 of us doing reviews right now.

Early voting for the 2025 #Virginia general election begins 11 weeks from today: Friday, Sept. 19.

(Fairfax: you’re three weeks from the start of early voting for the #VA11 special election to send @jameswalkinshaw.bsky.social to Congress.)

Help out the campaigns. Make a plan to be a Day 1 voter.

Small dog with tan fur rests and gets pet.

Chewy enjoys working from home

Please stop assuming that too many em dashes means AI written. Some of us are producing grammatically incoherent work the honest way!

It was bad 💯

Change in empathic disequilibrium across childhood and associations with socioemotional difficulties - European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Empathy, a socioemotional capacity with emotional and cognitive components, develops from infancy onward. An imbalance between these components, termed empathic disequilibrium, is related to socioemot...

Excited to share our new study tracking how empathic disequilibrium develops in children aged 3–12!
With @fuzefovsky.bsky.social, Prof Rebecca Waller & Dr Nicholas Wagner, we found that both forms of empathic disequilibrium are common across development.

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

#Empathy