Eric Hehman

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 Are police more right-wing and biased against marginalized groups than the general public? If so, why? My new article in
@pnas.org w/ @tylerreny.bsky.social, Newman, and Sears provides some answers. 🧵1/n

Perceptions of Safety and Threat in the Environment: The STEP Scale - Lora E. Park, Deborah E. Ward, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Elizabeth A. Canning, Nicole Koefler, Zaviera A. Panlilio, Valerie Vessels,... The Safety and Threat in Environment Perceptions (STEP) scale assesses perceptions of environments as safe (welcoming, inclusive) or threatening (critical, inti...

New paper out from the Self & Motivation Lab on Safety and Threat in the Environment Perceptions (STEP). The STEP scale assesses people's overall, gut-level impressions of any given space and uniquely predicts engagement, interest, & desire to recruit others
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

If you were alive in the 1980s, this is among the most wonderful & truly incredible things you have ever witnessed in your lifetime.

A new piece - well, almost a whole book! - by our team, reflecting more than a decade of work.

axolotl will always have first place in my heart

The impact of weather patterns on increasing violent crime and social cost in South Africa - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - The impact of weather patterns on increasing violent crime and social cost in South Africa

🌡️ Hotter, wetter weather linked to more violent crime

In South Africa, violent crime rises with heat, rain, and pollution. especially in warmer months. Researchers found climate factors now drive 60% of homicide-related social costs.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm #ClimateCrisis 🧪

🎉New paper out @Psychological Review on the neuroscience of intergroup contact🎉

Led by the fantastic @margaretrwelte.bsky.social ‬and Jas Cloutier!

@apajournals.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Survey invitations often describe the topic of the survey. A simple, classic example of how this biases results: survey recruitment materials about bird watching led to higher estimates of the % of people who engage in bird-watching. doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

New from @ara-eunkyung.bsky.social + me: social psychologists are often interested in space, but have to choose between abstractions at high levels of geography or images taken with limited geographic scope. We identify a tool to sample space at scale: mapping platforms, such as Google Street View.

A Tutorial on Representational Similarity Analysis for Research in Social Cognition | Social Cognition Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a simple and widely used technique for comparing relationships between diverse types of measures using a common set of elements. For instance, RSA allows researchers to compare brain and behavioral measures of the same set of participants, or response patterns to the same set of stimuli across different conditions. This technique effectively quantifies relationships between complex, high-dimensional measures even when their measurement units are not directly comparable, contributing to its recent popularity. However, existing tutorials focus on neuroscience use cases, limiting their applicability to social cognitive research. In this tutorial, we cover an accessible introduction to RSA, discussing its strengths and limitations compared to other multivariate methods. We provide commented code and functions in R and Python in the context of two examples that showcase different applications of RSA, illustrating its potential to address questions of broad interest to the field of social cognition.

But has some best practices! And you can find them in Social Cognition's special issue (w some other truly useful papers), here with R and python code: guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

We had a new tutorial on representational similarity analysis come out recently. Led by @xallysie.bsky.social with Ruoying Zheng and @chujunlin.bsky.social

This technique lets you compare patterns across diff types of measures (eg correlate correlation matrices), super flexible

🎉 New paper in Social and Personality Psychology Compass 🎉
𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀: 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀.
🔗 https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.111

City-Defined Neighborhood Boundaries in the United States - Scientific Data Scientific Data - City-Defined Neighborhood Boundaries in the United States

"City-Defined Neighborhood Boundaries in the United States"
We provide a new dataset of city-defined neighborhoods for 206 of the largest cities in the United States, covering more than 77 million people. 1/

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A high-dimensional model of social impressions People form social impressions from visual cues such as faces, which are argued by various models to arise from some limited set of fixed dimensions (e.g., trustworthiness and dominance). We argue tha...

In a TiCS paper, @chujunlin.bsky.social & I propose a high-dimensional model of social impressions.

Existing models focus on 2–4 latent dimensions (e.g. trustworthy/warm), but they often fall apart across different contexts, cultures, & perceivers. We need a paradigm shift.

shorturl.at/7GD1n (1/8)

Check our new—dare I say provocative—paper in Motivation Science, led by @eddiehj.bsky.social:

"Valid Replications Require Valid Methods: Recommendations for Best Methodological Practices With Lab Experiments"

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

Le site de Projet Implicite en français a fait l’objet d’une mise à jour conséquente. Quatre tests sont disponibles, y compris en version tactile (pour les téléphones mobiles et tablettes). N’hésitez pas à partager cette nouvelle et/ou à nous faire part de vos commentaires.
implicit.harvard.edu

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy.
Details found here👇

www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Paper w/ @tcarpenter.bsky.social & @alexgoedderz.bsky.social at PSPB!🚨 The standard IAT is only 5 min long. We found that making the IAT longer by taking it multiple times greatly improves predictive validity. 🧵below, with practical advice about how to run IATs!

LINK: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Registration for the Person Memory Meeting (Oct 13-16 in Lisbon, POR) is open! Info is here jacquelinemchen.wixsite.com/personmemory

Thrilled to share that my first first-authored publication is officially out (soon to be in press at Social Cognition)! 🚀

"From Data to Discovery: Unsupervised Machine Learning in Social Cognition"
📄 OSF preprint: osf.io/preprints/os...

We have a lovely new paper out, showing that even ignorant people can be very good at recognising who's knowledgeable based on minimal cues

Equivalence Tests with {marginaleffects} Reproducing the Clark and Golder (2006) example from Rainey (2014)

I just updated my post on equivalence testing with {marginaleffects} so that it's consistent with the latest version. (Some of the notes and code were outdated.)

www.carlislerainey.com/blog/2023-08...

A whole wagon for awards i see

Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection 30 Pages Posted: 19 May 2025 Simon Quach University of Southern California Zhengyi Yu University of Southern California - Department of Economics Date Written: May 15, 2025 Abstract This paper examines the labor market effects of Florida's 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a differencein-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Attending #APS25DC this Friday? Come to the symposium my advisor Peter Mende-Siedlecki & I are co-chairing, featuring talks by @rachelesh.bsky.social @xallysie.bsky.social @jowylie.bsky.social & myself!
⏰: Friday 1-2:20. 📍: Rm Piscataway

A mathematical model of person judgment part 1: Cue emergence - Daniel Leising, René L. Schilling, 2025 We present the first part of a fully parametrized mathematical model of person judgment, in an attempt to streamline and better organize theory in this research...

Finally published: my paper with mathematician Rene L. Schilling. In it, we attempt a comprehensive theoretical formalization of the substantive basis of person judgments.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Science abstract: POLICING High-frequency location data show that race affects citations and fines for speeding Pradhi Aggarwal1, Alec Brandon2*, Ariel Goldszmidt3, Justin Holz4, John A. List3, Ian Muir5, Gregory Sun6, Thomas Yu7 Prior research on racial profiling has found that in encounters with law enforcement, minorities are punished more severely than white civilians. Less is known about the causes of these encounters and their implications for our understanding of racial profiling. Using high-frequency location data of rideshare drivers in Florida (N = 222,838 individuals), we estimate the effect of driver race on citations and fines for speeding using 19.3 million location pings. Compared with a white driver traveling the same speed, we find that racial or ethnic minority drivers are 24 to 33% more likely to be cited for speeding and pay 23 to 34% more money in fines. We find no evidence that accident and reoffense rates explain these estimates, which suggests that an animus against minorities underlies our results.

missed this last month: data science informing psych, sociology, polisci

in Lyft data (222K drivers), Black or minority drivers get speeding tickets 1/3 more often **when they are known to be going the same speed**

beautiful work, it's racial profiling, case closed

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New lab paper in JESP! What is the association between gender and food portion sizes? And how might such associations impact actual real-world treatment? We used lab and field studies to explore this question 🍽️

A learning and memory account of impression formation and updating - Nature Reviews Psychology Impression formation occurs when a perceiver infers another person’s traits, goals and preferences and forms an attitude towards that person. In this Perspective, Amodio describes the unique and inter...

I’m thrilled to share my new paper on impression formation & updating in @natrevpsychol.nature.com!

In it, I argue that impression formation is fundamentally a learning process. And as such, theories of impression formation should be based on mechanisms of learning and memory.

Some key take-aways: