✨ 🤖 New pre-print: Is realism dead and do people distrust everything, now that synthetic media is ubiquitous? It’s a bit more complicated.

“In the name of safeguarding democracy, open societies are importing the policies of authoritarian regimes they rightly identify as enemies of free expression,” argues @JMchangama. foreignaffairs.com/europe/en…

An new audit of YouTube shows it’s not a radicalization engine: - It doesn’t push people into echo chambers - Conditional on people’s pre-existing inclinations, it may facilitate viewers’ falling into rabbit holes - Still, the platform actually appears to nudge users toward ideological moderation overall An important paper which could be of interest to @jayvanbavel @MattGrossmann @danwilliamsphil @cphoffmann @Sacha_Altay and others tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…

Moral grandstanding (the use of moral and political discourse to gain social status) is associated with stronger affective polarization This link was partly connected to dichotomous thinking--seeing complex political issues in black-and-white terms. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c2… However, moral grandstanding was also linked to self-reported civic engagement.

The denial of reality has been a terrible move in the humanities and social sciences. This report is a serious critique of many of the problems I've seen in academia that have gotten out of control in the past few years. And it is led by some of the leading experts across these fields (Joe Henrich, Anthony Appiah, and many others). We seriously need to fix these issues if we have any hope of regaining credibility and public trust.

„organizations can avoid it by permanently shifting priorities—tolerating some problems ad hoc and devoting sustained effort to pruning obsolete processes“ 🙏🏼🙏🏼

1. Does drawing harder boundaries between science and "misinformation" increase or decrease public trust in science? In four studies conducted in the context of COVID-19, we tested this question by comparing different approaches to science communication. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

NEW in @ScienceAdvances, after 3 years of work with a great team: We review and meta-analyze 100 immigrant conjoint experiments in 36 countries. Immigration preferences are surprisingly similar across people and countries, but changing over time and structured by politics. 🧵

Was one of the best books I read last year, will be one of the best I read this year. ✨ $4 Kindle ✨ "What I can say, rereading the text now, is that I remain convinced by it. In many cases, new research has confirmed rather than challenged the core claims of the book."

Americans trust local and state governments more partly because they hear less about them; hearing more about national news is associated with lower trust in national government journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…

Looks like we need more studies of BlueSky discourse 🫣

Fast ein Jahr alt, vielleicht aktueller den je: Die BlueSky-Echokammer ist eine Gefahr - für die Linke. machine-vs-rage.net/blog/dei…

Americans with Graduate degrees (now 14.5% of the population) are far more liberal & vote far more consistently Democratic than those with only undergraduate degrees; & local graduate degrees are very strong predictors of geographic voting patterns journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…

Excited to present my JMP at MPSA! The post-Floyd “Great Awokening” was driven by affluent white liberals and emphasized recognition over redistribution. Evidence from surveys, public discourse, and implicit bias data. Consistent with elite capture of identity politics. ⬇️

Does partisanship affect justifications of political violence? Berntzen et al. find that both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to justify identical acts of political violence when the victims are from the opposing party. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfag010

How do voters “think ideologically” in multiparty systems? In POQ, Lachance & Treger find that Canadian voters use left–right labels as shortcuts to infer candidates’ positions, even when they don't fully align with their policy preferences. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfag015

This new report from @Yale University explains why universities have lost public trust and how we can regain it. The committee offered dozens of recommendations, like expanding financial aid, reducing admissions preferences, zealously protecting free speech and adjusting grading policies. People in academia, the committee said, “must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve, even as we defend what is essential about higher education and its academic mission.” What do you think? nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/ya…

Moral inversion and the rise of authoritarian sympathy Ideologies that claim to be anti-oppressive, like antizionism and far-left progressivism, say they fight for the oppressed and against the violation of universal human rights. We put these claims to the test, by asking 1270 Americans to assess the human rights records of democracies and authoritarian regimes, and take a battery of psychological tests. The results were striking. Study link and highlights in 🧵

🚨New preprint. Many papers show AI can write fact-checks as well as humans (or better) in the lab, but very few test this in the real world. We run the first online evaluation of AI fact-check writing with X Community Notes’ AI writer API. Paper w. @bakkermichiel 1/

📰 Do the effects of partisan media fade quickly or accumulate over time? ➡️ Using multiwave experiments, M Baum et al. show a single exposure can have effects lasting up to a week, while cumulative effects are hard to detect cambridge.org/core/journals/… #FirstView