Nils Reimer

I wish people cared about research more - this is devastating, and it should be a bigger story.

We teach what we teach. The end. The first amendment exist or it doesn’t. We are in the business of education or we aren’t. There’s no middle ground.

Unveiling the social fabric through a temporal, nation-scale social network and its characteristics - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Unveiling the social fabric through a temporal, nation-scale social network and its characteristics

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What does the social fabric of an entire country look like?
We built a nation-scale social network of Denmark — 7.2 million people, 1.4 billion ties, 14 years of data.
Here’s what we found 👇
📄 doi.org/10.1038/s415...
#NetworkScience #Sociology

Opinion | Juan Crow Is Back With a Vengeance

"The policies of this administration reinstate an era in which the rights conferred to all people in the United States by the Constitution are subject to a sliding scale of extralegal violability depending on one’s race, ethnicity or assumed immigration status."

Call this fascism Juan Crow.

Our new study in Psych Science @psychscience.bsky.social reveals many interesting-- and concerning -- things about the language on kids' shows, including a grammatical bias in favor of men and boys as agents or "doers" 👇

Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.

Extremely disappointing & cowardly. The American Psychological Association is rescinding diversity requirements. Not due to any actual mandate from the federal government, but only because it may *someday* face pressure from the government www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/h...

‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza For months Israel kept food shipments to Gaza far below starvation rations. Now the death toll is rising rapidly

Damn everyone who enables this horror.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Newly accepted in PSPB! We examined whether Asian and Black Americans perceived one another through a zero-sum lens. Inspired by the SCOTUS affirmative action decisions, I wanted to know if Asians thought they were losing to Black people and how this mindset affects coalition
osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!

Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

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

🎉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-...

A Nazi owns Twitter, right wing billionaires own the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times, and CBS is run by a right wing nepo baby who just fired one of the network’s biggest stars for criticizing Donald Trump. Here’s why America has a left-wing media bias problem.

It's a Bird, it's a Plane, it's Superman! Using Mass Media to Fight Intolerance

This paper investigates the role of mass media in shaping racial tolerance and advancing civil rights in the post-WWII United States. We study the first attempt in the history of mass media to use a radio broadcast targeted at children to promote an inclusive American society. In 1946, amid persistent racial divisions, the popular radio series The Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination, and exposing the KKK's bigotry. Using digitized historical data on U.S. radio stations and state-of-the-art radio propagation models, we compute geographic exposure to the broadcasts. Exploiting exogenous exposure to the broadcasts, we employ a cohort study design to analyze individual-level data from 1964 to 1980–a crucial period for civil rights activism and legislation in the United States. We find lasting impacts on those exposed as children, including increased support for civil rights, improved interraci

Figure 1 reveals that the proportion of words related to intolerance increased by 3.2 times in the 12 months following the start of Operation Intolerance, compared to the pre-intervention period.

Panel A of Figure 5 plots the average of the index for different cohorts. We first observe that younger cohorts in 1946 are more supportive of civil rights compared to those born before 1946. This is in line with American society becoming more progressive over time. We find a difference of 0.29 standard deviations between the respondents in the age cohort -10 (i.e., those born in the years 1954–1958) and those in the age cohort 50

“In 1946 amid persistent racial divisions, popular radio series Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination and exposing the KKK’s bigotry. We find lasting impacts…” dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

What a ‘Spiral of Silence’ Can Do to a Democracy Protests show people they are not alone in caring about an issue.

“The fact that organized protest can break the spiral of silence, and correct our impressions of what other Americans think, is one of the most immediate and important values of protesting in the first place. Scientists have [shown] protests update our impressions of what other citizens believe.”

🧪 Translation for NSF folks:

Yesterday's SCOTUS decision will likely soon result in these previously blocked actions:

-elimination of NSF divisions as an org unit

-closing Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, firing its staff

Can still be challenged in court (see below). But still 🤯🤯🤯

I am pleased to see academics pushing back hard against the unquestioning adoption of AI. This quote captures all of my concerns in a nutshell.

Plot showing skewed distribution toward comp science and applied physics

The 500 additional GRFPs NSF awarded were not very evenly distributed across fields, it seems.
www.science.org/content/arti...

That's another great one. I loved the novel and the movie does it justice.

Ever since a random man waiting for the same bus as us in Boston told Ananya and me to watch Mississippi Masala, it's been one of my favorite movies.

Reviewer notes: So you’re interested in “lagged effects.” In some fields, researchers who end up with time series of two variables of interest (X and Y) like to analyze (reciprocal) lagged effects between them. Does X affect Y at a later point in time, and d...

New blog post! Let's say you've measured two variables repeatedly and want to investigate how one affects the other over time. Here are some recommendations for how to do that well.

www.the100.ci/2025/06/25/r...

I know, right? We've been rewatching a lot of her movies for the last few weeks. 😄

Nonviolent alternatives reduce external support for rebel groups: Evidence from two cross-national survey experiments - Matthew Cebul, Jonathan Pinckney, 2025 How do nonviolent alternatives affect international support for violent rebel groups? Armed rebellions are often sustained by outside sympathy and support, whic...

New study by @matthewcebul.bsky.social & J. Pinckney asks “How do nonviolent alternatives affect international support for violent rebel groups?”

Surveys across 30+ countries find “alternative resistance options consistently reduce support for armed rebellion…” journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The abstract of the paper titled *“Exposure to Protests and Support for Different Forms of Violence: Evidence from the 2019 Social Outburst in Chile”* by Sebastian Rivera, Fernando Severino, and Giancarlo Visconti presents the following key points: * **Context**: Communities exposed to protests encounter both **state violence** (e.g., police brutality) and **protester violence** (e.g., riots, looting). * **Research Question**: Does proximity to protests influence people's support for different types of violence? * **Method**: A **difference-in-differences** analysis using **panel data from Chile (2016–2022)** surrounding the 2019 mass protests. * **Findings**: * **Exposure to protests temporarily reduces support for state repression**. * **No significant change in support for protester violence**. * **Conclusion**: The study contributes a nuanced view of how protest exposure influences public attitudes toward violence from different sources.

### **Summary of Figure 1:** **Title:** *Average support for violence from the state and protesters over time* **Key Takeaways:** * **Top panel: Support for violence from the state** * Support declines sharply in 2019 for both groups. * The **exposed group** (those living near protests) shows a **lower support** than the control group immediately after 2019. * This gap **narrows** again by 2021–2022, suggesting the effect is **short-lived**. * **Bottom panel: Support for violence from protesters** * Both groups show **low and relatively stable support** across all years. * There is **no substantial divergence** between exposed and control groups, indicating **little or no effect** of exposure on attitudes toward protester violence.

Summary of Figure 2: Title: Effects of protest shocks on support for violence from the state and protesters over time Top Panel: State Violence Y-axis: DiD estimate (effect of exposure to protest) X-axis: Years before and after the 2019 social outbreak Key pattern: The estimate drops below zero in the first year after the protests, suggesting a statistically meaningful decline in support for state violence among those exposed. This dip appears to fade in subsequent years, indicating the effect is temporary. Bottom Panel: Protester Violence Flat and near zero throughout, both before and after the protests. Confidence intervals consistently include zero. This suggests no detectable causal effect of protest exposure on support for violence by protesters. Plain-language interpretation: Exposure to Chile's 2019 protests reduced support for police or state violence, but this effect was short-lived. In contrast, it had no measurable impact on support for protester violence.

New study uses multi-year data from Chile and finds “exposure to protests decreases support for state repression, but only for a short time. However, such exposure does not significantly influence support for the violence perpetrated by protesters.” www.giancarlovisconti.com/pdfs/Rivera,...

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.” www.politico.com/magazine/sto...

The global aid sector is quite literally on the brink of death right now and the human fallout globally is already obscene and will keep getting much, much worse.

People in the U.S. need to be far more aware of this - and angry - than they currently are.

I'm an Associate Editor at Current Directions in Psychological Science and I have a new Special Issue call on Intergroup Allyship. Proposal submissions are due by July 18. Please share widely!
www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

New PRRI Poll: Six in Ten Americans Oppose Exporting Undocumented Immigrants to Foreign Prisons Without Due Process Under the Trump administration, immigration enforcement has taken an unprecedented turn as immigrants, including asylum seekers and individuals with legal protections, are now being transferred to…

BREAKING @prri.org poll.
My disturbing take: It’s virtually impossible to write a survey question about the treatment of immigrants that is too brutal for Republicans to support.
1) 8 in 10 Republicans support renditions of immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.
prri.org/spotlight/ne...

Opinion | This Is What Makes Protests Successful

Yesterday, @robbwiller.bsky.social and I published an opinion essay making the case for the power of nonviolent protest. I’m proud of our work but also think we could have done more to “steel man” case *against* nonviolence. Here’s essay. Some counterarguments in 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/o...

A line chart with a blue line showing a large growth of protest events from Jan 20 - May 31, 2025, and a green line showing the relatively modest growth of protest events during the same period in 2017.

My team and I at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman@bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) have a new piece out: wagingnonviolence.org/2025/06/amer.... In it, we show that through May 2025, the size and scale of anti-Trump protests have dwarfed those in 2017. 🧵