Meltem Yucel

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Sorta feels like "they are actively gutting cancer research" should be finding more purchase out there

Gave my last lab presentation yesterday.

🤗 I'm gonna miss y'all SO much! 🤗

New preprint out by the wonderful @vbojarskich.bsky.social.

Check it out!

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Here, Vought doesn’t dispute slow-walking release of NIH grants from congressionally appropriated funds so that they can be cancelled in a couple of months through pocket rescission, thereby bypassing congress to enact huge cuts to NIH research.

This. Not just the summer, but also the year(s) ahead. I've been having conversations with fellow academics about the push to do the same or more with less (as funding cuts set it). It's not sustainable. At some point we will just have to do less.

We need to decide what is essential, and what's not

The country has really turned on his wild immigration escalation. It's true in all polling. Here's Ipsos/Reuters 3/

Screenshot of title and abstract of paper, "In their God we trust: Religious Cognition increases cooperation across religious divides." Abstract: Belief in moralizing Gods is widely thought to foster cooperation between coreligionists, but there is disagreement regarding whether this effect is limited to the religious ingroup or if it extends to members of religious outgroups. Here we report the results of a cross-cultural research program that demonstrates that people who think about God (a) are more trusted by both coreligionists and members of other religious groups and (b) typically behave in a more trustworthy manner toward both ingroups and outgroups. We ran three preregistered studies (N= 1,784) with Christians and Muslims in the United States, Jews and Muslims in Israel, and Christians and Hindus in Fiji. Our contexts varied in multiple ways, including the level of intergroup conflict. Using two-player trust games involving real money, we varied whether participants interacted with ingroup or outgroup members and whether reciprocators considered God when deciding how much to return to trustors. We nd in each context that making moralizing God beliefs of one player salient enhances both intragroup and intergroup cooperation. Our ndings add to a nascent literature documenting the potential for religious cognition to extend moral norms across intergroup divides. We discuss implications for theories of the emergence of moralizing Gods and implications for public debates about religious pluralism in diverse societies.

Now out in JPSP! Behavioral economic experiments w/ Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews in the U.S., Israel and Fiji show that belief in God can facilitate cooperation, even across religious divides! More about our work (co-led with @jeremyginges.bsky.social) below! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

We are hiring research assistants for Fall 2025!

Are you an @msupsychology.bsky.social undergraduate interested in gaining hands-on experience in developmental and social psychology research?

Fill out the interest form and we’ll be in touch soon!

www.moralmindslab.com/join-our-tea...

John H. Flavell, influential scholar of developmental psychology, has died Remembered for his humility and generosity, Flavell was a giant in his field.

Obituary for John Flavell, who passed away this spring. He was a wonderful guy.

news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

I've been having that problem:

MAXMINDS 2.0 Homepage MAXMINDS 2.0

It is with great pleasure that I share MAXMINDS 2.0, a new Max Planck program to support scholars in danger of displacement by war or natural disasters, and who have limited access to resources and institutional support.

If you know affected scholars, please share.

www.maxminds.mpg.de

Being Too Helpful At Work Can Hurt Your Career—Here’s How To Say No Women are more likely to take on behind-the-scenes duties at work—extra tasks like onboarding or event planning—and it's hurting their careers. Here's how to say no.

In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...

RMarkdown is a game-changer. Over the past two years, I’ve gradually moved all my #R code into #RMarkdown, and it’s been incredibly helpful.

The feeling reminds me of when I switched from manually managing references to using #Zotero, total upgrade.

Dear brain scientists from all over - I welcome you to follow this account to keep up with the great work coming from Duke University researchers in diverse areas of neuroscience, psychology, imaging, medicine, ethics, the mind, behavior and all other things 🧠📈 🧪 ‼️

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Congrats, Emma!!!

Fabulous news! Congrats!!

Wahoos4UVA have been collecting signatures

Open Letter on Academic Freedom at UVA Open Letter from Members of the Faculty of the University of Virginia In light of reporting that officials at the Department of Justice are pressuring University of Virginia President Jim Ryan to re...

More than 100 UVA faculty (and counting) have signed an open letter condemning political interference in the university. The forced installation of a new president under these circumstances will cast a shadow on teaching and research. Read here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I get to be the proud alum who explains to everybody in the group chat how the governor pushed people onto the board and those new members began working with DOJ to threaten the president so he would resign so they could do a coup and replace him with someone that would destroy the university

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

This is naked authoritarianism. It is exactly what happened in Turkey. There is nothing to stop this regime from demanding that faculty be purged too. Everyone must stand up and push back.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u...

Trump Justice Dept. Pressuring University of Virginia President to Resign

The Trump administration wants to control who leads universities, and will use legal threats to do so.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/u...

Join Us | Elenbaas Lab In the Social Development Lab, we study how children think about people, groups, and society. The lab is supervised by Dr. Laura Elenbaas.

I’m hiring a lab manager! Full time, starting this summer. Perfect for a BA/BS grad or post-bac with child or family research experience interested in developmental psych or HDFS. Complete details and application link here: www.elenbaaslab.com/join #devpsyc #socialpsyc #familysci #psychjobs

Day 2 of #SPP2025 begins with a fascinating talk by @chriskrupenye.bsky.social on whether chimpanzees and bonobos have a theory of mind. Krupenye’s studies show that our ape cousins track others’ knowledge not just to obtain food but also for a seemingly intrinsic love of drama!

MIT just pubbed a study on ChatGPT users.

“Brain scans revealed neural connection collapse... a 47% reduction in brain connectivity. When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write w/o AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all. It's not just dependency. It's cognitive atrophy.”

I've started to create a Google doc to compile & share cog psych teaching resources, organized by topics (e.g., attention, memory, language) & resource types.

This week, I ask you to share any in-class demos you'd like to give. Please reply to this post or tag me in a separate post. Thanks!

Congratulations!!!!