Calvin Lai

Agree that these are important and sobering findings for Political Scientists who aspire to a job at 1 of 122 PhD granting political science departments.

This does *not*, however, mean that you won't get a good job if you don't go to a "top 20" program.

(1/3)

Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣

"The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct"
Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13%

Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006)

The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%).
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

iconic scene from Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey in scrub telling Derek "so pick me, choose me, love me"

On election day, I wanna announce that I am recruiting social psych PhD students for my lab at UIC. My lab focuses on racial identities (esp Asian, Latino, MENA Americans) and intra-minority conflict/ coalition. So please tell your students to pick me! All details on my website: www.pbandjlab.com

Our first lab meeting reading this as a preprint is a flashbulb memory. It was such an elegantly argued paper for a phenomenon that was so clearly untrue. Either our methods needed improvement, or we must entertain that psi was true. I wished we had psychic powers! (It would make our jobs so easy)

What “error” has had the most positive consequences for your field this century?

I’ll start:

The editorial decision to accept Bem’s precognition paper at JPSP.

We read the (in)famous Bem Feeling the Future JPSP paper for a "spooky" Halloween lab meeting and it was fabulous!! I couldn't get over the wild methodological issue where they type of psychic power he founded depended on what random number generator Bem used 😂

The (In)Effectiveness of Psychological Targeting: A Meta‐Analytic Review The use of psychological targeting—employing machine learning to predict consumer personality from digital footprints and subsequently tailoring persuasive messages—has emerged as a controversial yet...

"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be
predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."

Good threads. We used SESOIs pretty extensively in our recent registered reports (e.g. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...). We found plenty of "significant" effects, but ones that were smaller than our SESOI.

1/4

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

Willful ignorance is also motivated by social identity concerns--it is driven by ingroup favoritism + outgroup derogation and fuels conspiracy belies.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

YouTube video by Brooke Miller Symbolic Representation - Scale Models

Why do young kids try to climb into tiny toy cars? Remembering Judy DeLoache’s work on how babies learn to understand symbols and symbolic representation 💙

youtu.be/PK_BQjVHZ00?...

Yikes yikes yikes

A massive study on the effects of social class tested 35 hypotheses in 4 countries (N = 33,536)

Only 50% of findings replicated

Hypotheses based on differences between social class contexts in terms of constraints, uncertainty & status were supported:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heartbroken to share that Judy DeLoache passed away yesterday. She was a brilliant scientist and a fantastic role model.

I met her 10+ years ago as a grad student @uvapsychology.bsky.social. She believed in me at my lowest and inspired me to persevere through the challenges of grad school + life.

Public health is under attack by a deluge of misinformation. We offer a consensus report from the American Psychological Association summarizing what we know & what interventions are effective in countering it. We provide 8 concrete recommendations. Open-access - awspntest.apa.org/fulltext/202...

it's funny to see things like this every day, reflexively ask yourself "where is the limit," remember that "there are no limits" but then have your inner institutionalist say "but imagine if one day we do reach a limit lol"

Opinion: Why Washington University must not sign Trump's 'compact' Washington University in St. Louis has built its reputation on a simple ideal: excellence wins. For decades, our researchers have competed for and won federal grants based on the quality

New editorial from me and @keithschnak.bsky.social.

“Why Washington University must not sign Trump's 'compact'”

Looks like an important new working paper. The wave of anti-DEI laws since 2021 has had real effects on hiring at public colleges.

ungated: osf.io/preprints/so...

This preprint reports on a project with @j-rock.bsky.social.

We merged a light touch intervention (typical of survey experiments) w/ an intensive intervention (more typical of practitioner efforts) for reducing toxic polarization to see if we could cheaply boost 🚀 the more intensive intervention

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch #PsychSciSky

Our new paper out in American Psychologist.

Led by Meleady, with @debshulman.bsky.social, Kotzur, & Crisp.

Contact "ruptures" (going to university; studying abroad) ==> changes in outgroup attitudes longitudinally

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Current tally of American social psychologists at SESP in Lisbon saying "here" to refer to the USA: 2 😂

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality?

Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This.

(The entire article is required reading, but I especially appreciate this section)

When the Founding Fathers adopted the First Amendment, the censorship that kept them up at night was censorship or private citizens by the government. That's what they made unconstitutional. Not social pressure. Not social media pile-ons. Not hate speech. Censorship by the government.

The Self & Identity Preconference provides a forum for discussion and investigation of the complexity of the individual and the collective self. This year's preconference introduces a special focus on activism and allyship, highlighting factors facilitating the formation of activist and ally identities and barriers to identifying as activists or allies. This preconference will explore the impact of context in shaping activist identification and consider the role of the current socio-political climate on our ability to advocate for our "selves" and for others. In addition to several speakers, the preconference will also include presentations by scholarly award winners, a poster session, an early-career data blitz, and a mentoring/networking session.

Announcing SPSP's 2026 Self & Identity precon (bit.ly/4mn2WDT), which will have a timely focus on activist and ally identities. We have a phenomenal set of speakers (Linda Tropp! Kim Rios! Lucy De Souza! Teri Kirby! Dan McAdams!) and are accepting data blitz and poster submissions until Oct 23!

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

White House Officials Vow Vast Crackdown on Liberal Groups
www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

Open authoritarianism. Happening right in front of us.

A Letter by Israeli Social Psychologists Dear friends of the Social Psychology community, After October 7, a group of Israeli social psychologists, including many of us, wrote a letter expressing our deep shock at the massacre, abuse, rape,...

Breaking a hiatus to post this.

A group of Israeli Social Psychologists, myself included, wrote a letter to speak out clearly against the Israeli government’s decisions and the resulting devastation in Gaza.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

In hopes of peace and safety for all, and soon

I was listening to that playlist while reading your thread and they pair together well 😊