Evan Stewart

Stop submitting AI slop to journals and preprint servers

This is anti-social behavior. It is making life harder for everyone involved except for the person submitting the slop

Report: It Pretty Incredible That Americans Entrusted With Driving Cars WASHINGTON—Citing that a majority of Americans are irresponsible, easily distracted people who have little regard for other human beings, a new Department of Transportation report revealed Wednesday t...

“WASHINGTON—Citing that a majority of Americans are irresponsible, easily distracted people who have little regard for other human beings, a new Dept of Transportation report revealed that it’s ‘actually kind of crazy’ that U.S. citizens are allowed to drive automobiles.”

The Onion strikes again.

One big, achievable win for the American Sociological Association @asanews.bsky.social: create a single upload recommendation system for doctoral admissions (akin to the law school admissions).

One upload for each student would be a real blessing.

We met up with @sssreligion.bsky.social recently in Minneapolis, Minnesota to ask "What Are You Working On?" Meet emerging scholars and familiar faces working on all things religious scholarship!

A person stands at a podium giving a conference presentation in a hotel meeting room. A projection screen next to them displays a colorful slide titled “Spirituality at Scale: A Large-Sample Study of Tarot Readings,” co-authored by an associate professor and a PhD candidate in sociology at UMass Boston. The presenter faces the audience while the slide includes bright geometric shapes in blue, orange, pink, and yellow tones.

👏 Exciting news!

PhD candidate Cam Marsinelli (@cmarsinelli.bsky.social) presented research at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Minneapolis.

With Dr. Evan Stewart (@evanstewart.bsky.social), they used AI to analyze YouTube tarot readings + engagement. Congrats! 💙 #UMB #Sociology

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...

There is an important point about religious pluralism here: as demographics change we are going to encounter more and more disagreement about these kinds of cases. "Is this a religious symbol?" vs. "Is it a broader symbol of first responders?" gets higher stakes with more religiously unaffiliated.

The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others While some research argues that religious pluralism in the United States dampens conflict by promoting tolerance, other work documents persistent prejudice toward religious out-groups. We address t...

As a researcher who studies public religious expression, it is really important to separate it from personal religious adherence - unexpected combinations of the two are more common than we would think!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Judge halts saints statues from going up in Quincy “We chose the statues of Michael and Florian to honor Quincy’s first responders, not to promote any religion,” said Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch.

Which, for me, is really interesting to see at the local level even in a conventionally "blue" state.
www.wbur.org/news/2025/10...

"Koch is a devout Catholic...But even as an independent, he received support from Gov. Maura Healey and other key Democrats..."

"As Quincy’s mayor of 17 years, Koch has generated multiple controversies since he was reelected to a seventh term last year. Behind closed doors, he dedicated roughly $850,000 of public money to commission statues of two Catholic saints for a new public safety building. He also proposed a wage hike that would have given him a 79% raise, and his city clerk discounted more than a third of the signatures submitted in a ballot initiative to rein in the pay raise. Both issues are tied up in litigation."

Wild day for local politics. Big shifts on the Quincy, MA city council, and while most of the conversation is about broader city issues it is also a fight about...public religious expression!
www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...

The Physiology of Sociology: Students’ Biometric Response to Lessons on Race and Racism - Jennifer Patrice Sims, Melinda Lanius, Ryan Conners, Candice Lanius, 2025 Because most White people remain uncomfortable discussing or even just hearing about anything to do with race, White students in sociology classrooms often beco...

#MorningReads Using heart rate monitors in an intro socio class, researchers found that students showed mild to moderate stress responses, though patterns varied & didnt always align w/ demographic categories. Authors discuss implications for teaching strategies.

ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/...

The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.

Minneapolis

Good morning Minneapolis! The #SSSR_RRA2025 Annual Meeting begins today with a full weekend of plenary sessions, receptions, networking events and papers exploring this year’s theme “Religion Matters.”

Full program. ⬇️ #Research #SocialScience #Religion
sssreligion.org/annual-meeti...

Across social media sites, political posting is tightly linked to affective #polarization - the most partisan users post the most

As casual users disengage & polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme
arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows Brain imaging is illuminating the patterns linked to productive, positive dialogue, and those insights could help people connect with others

New neuroscience research shows that when people try to persuade, their brains sync less and cover fewer ideas. But when they enter a discussion to learn or compromise, their brains diverge in ways that foster creativity, understanding, & shared solutions.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Contemporary Views and Uses of Astrology in the United States: A Descriptive, Mixed-Methods Analysis - Shiri Noy, Avantaea Siefke, Katie E. Corcoran, Christopher P. Scheitle, 2025 Astrology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Its ubiquity in contemporary social life suggests that astrology may be an important component of Americans’ ident...

"...it is important to situate astrology not only in the realm of 'supernatural' and 'paranormal' belief but also in broader trends toward personality 'tests' and categories...that seek to enhance people’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world." 🌞🌝📋 doi.org/10.1177/2329...

Necessity or Luxury? Air Conditioning and Support for Utility Assistance in the Context of Climate Change - Evan Stewart, 2024 Studies of climate attitudes are increasingly concerned with support for mitigation policies such as adequate indoor cooling to address heat exposure. Air condi...

Of course, moral judgment is at the heart of a lot of climate mitigation issues. Judgement for me, but not for thee?
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Conceptualizing Affective Climate Polarization - Emily Huddart, Tony Silva, Parker Muzzerall, Sophia Dimitrakopoulos, 2025 Existing research demonstrates that liberals are more likely than conservatives to endorse climate policies. Scholars attribute this to differences in worldview...

Important work on affective climate polarization: authors find "emotional distance" on decarbonization

"...supporters’ frustration at opponents’ resistance to endorsing policy to mitigate climate change, and opponents’ frustration at being morally judged"
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A screenshot from contexts.org shows a photo of a man with both hands over his heart as he addresses several other seated people. The caption reads: Many of those in the burgeoning field of recovery coaching find that their own past drug use can become an asset in helping others overcome addiction. iStockPhoto // Jacob Wackerhausen. Below the caption is the article's headling, "Listing Addiction on Your Resume," and byline, "By Elena G. Van Stee."

One man's stigma is another man's professional asset? In "Listing Addiction on Your Resume," @elenavanstee.bsky.social covers recent work from Joe Silcox and @evanstewart.bsky.social on personal experience and the emerging field of recovery coaching
contexts.org/articles/lis...

#sociology #sobriety

"highly transferable skills—relevant not only to academia or nonprofit work, but to ... finance, marketing, business, and more. And yet, when students express interest in these broader arenas, they’re often met with hesitation, if not outright silence, from faculty." 👏👏👏
contexts.org/blog/dream-b...

“There Wasn’t A Playbook For This”: Local Congregations and the Crises of 2020 Abstract. Using 18 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, this paper highlights how religious congregations made se

New publication! 🚨 How do church leaders foster commitment + preserve organizational vitality in the face of crisis?

"There Wasn't A Playbook For This: Local Congregations and the Crises of 2020," out today in Sociology of Religion, offers insight from MN academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...

This is true for students too. Yes there are many factors impacting student reading, but working 30+ hours a week to be able to afford college is definitely one of them.

Excited for this to be out at PS -- discussion of our DPR program at @denisonuniversity.bsky.social that frontloads quant methods. @mdwilliamsphd.bsky.social and I also present survey evidence that the idea is popular among political scientists.

new pub alert! 🚨

Very much looking forward to this next month. We have a great program put together for the conference! #SSSR_RRA2025

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/...

"What I take from Aaron is that the best way to be truly productive on the margin, is to try to build for other people and connect them together."

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

We got the all clear a few minutes ago. Thankful that things seem ok now.

Monitoring this, quite worried given everything. I’m ok - not on campus today - working on checking in with folks.