stephen

This research highlights the social and psychological forces that keep different-race individuals "around but not close". By identifying these normative trends, we aim to provide scholars and practitioners with more levers to encourage meaningful and cooperative cross-race engagement.

Pathways to Stability: Despite these trends, the research identified critical exceptions. Individuals who formed cross-race kin relationships (e.g., through marriage) maintained the most stable cross-race contact over time.

Relationship Quality: Participants reported lower levels of felt closeness and fewer "high-effort" interpersonal behaviors—such as confiding in or seeking advice—with different-race contacts compared to same-race contacts.

Role Differences: Even when present in a network, different-race contacts frequently occupied less intimate roles (e.g., coworkers) and were less likely to be viewed as friends or kin.

Contextual Barriers: Different-race contacts were significantly more likely to be met in large, non-intimate settings such as work or college, while more intimate settings like the family of origin remained predominantly racially homophilous.

Using longitudinal data from the UCNets study (N=1,156 Bay Area adults), we examined the everyday social processes of how cross-race relationships are formed and maintained. Our analysis reveals a consistent “normative distancing” of different-race contacts within personal networks, including:

New paper on cross-race contact from my lab, forthcoming in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: “Around but not close? Mapping normative trends in cross-race contact during adulthood”.

Read the postprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thanks, Max!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Read the full study here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A huge thank you to my co-authors Juan Garcia-Cardenas, Eileen Graham, and Daniel Mroczek for their work on this project.

This result suggests that class identity is more dynamic than previously thought, potentially responding to both losses in resources and new social comparisons (e.g., the "1% vs. 99%" discourse).

These data sets include data from the 1950s (American National Election Studies) and 1970s (General Social Survey) through the present day, and a longitudinal study examining within-person change (Health and Retirement Study).

In three of four national data sets, we found evidence that Americans' class identity decreased, on average, following the Great Recession.

Theories of class identity formation predict that all of these factors would lead people to identify as a relatively lower class, but this prediction had not been tested. So we tested it.

The 2008 Great Recession was devastating: huge losses in income and wealth; massive increases in unemployment; and a growing sense that many people were falling behind with dimming futures.

Most past research has treated class identity as a static aspect of people's lives, with only very short-term change studied. We investigated the possibility of long-term change in class identity by using the 2008 Great Recession as an external source of socioeconomic change in Americans' lives.

People's class identity—how they perceive their amount of social and economic resources and convert them into a "social class" to belong to.

Rounding out 2025 with a new publication in Psychological Science! @psychscience.bsky.social

What psychological factor predicts having better physical health, greater happiness, being stereotyped positively, and voting conservatively?

Learn more about our work: saslab.ucr.edu

@ucriverside.bsky.social

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Cheng! We are looking forward to the innovative research she will bring.

Dr. Cheng is a social–personality psychologist whose research focuses on the codevelopment of personality and educational experiences in youth. At the Self & Society Lab, she will spearhead our growing focus on class identity and lifespan transactions between personality and economic resources.

🎉 Major Announcement for the Self & Society Laboratory!

We are absolutely overjoyed to share some exciting news as the quarter winds down: Dr. Rongxin Cheng will be joining the lab as a Post-Doctoral Research Scholar in January 2026!

Thank you!

As the new school year starts (and my third year as an assistant professor), I'm very honored that our @ucriverside.bsky.social Psychology PhD students voted me Faculty of the Year for last year.

Congrats!

I'm looking for a PhD student to do some trailblazing at the frontier of personality genomics and lifespan gene-environment transactions (start Fall 2026)! If you want to work with me: psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud...
(PS @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social is taking a student too, in moral psych/dev!)

We’re hiring an assistant or associate professor to join our psychology department at the University of Illinois Chicago! We’re a vibrant research-active department in a great city, a diverse institution with a purpose-driven mission, and a fun place to work! #psychjobs

uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

📣 Heads-up that our amazing dept (Berkeley Psych) is anticipating hiring *two* TT Asst Profs this Fall, under the themes of (1) Social & Personality Psychology, and (2) Biological Basis of Behavior.

Official job ads coming soon...

Send qs for (1) to Iris Mauss/Serena Chen, (2) to Linda Wilbrecht

Congrats, Bill!