Advancing a dynamic approach to cultural psychology beyond stable dichotomies - Nature Reviews Psychology The framework of individualism versus collectivism has encouraged conceptions of culture as dichotomous, bounded, monolithic and stable. In this Review, Uskul and Mesquita describe research that moves...

Advancing a dynamic approach to cultural psychology beyond stable dichotomies

Review by Ayse K. Uskul & Batja Mesquita

go.nature.com/4dYXRRY

This is right.

This paper was first conceived during the 2015 Rachel Dolezal debate. If race is fluid and constructed, why can’t she be Black?

Well, parentage is part of that construction, & the question is how much weight we give it alongside other traits.

A decade later, here’s the full reply.

Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026. Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.

Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics!

Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper.

More soon!

Home — Workshops

Join us for our free contributing to #OpenSource workshop.

📅 Thursday April 30th 12:00 - 13:00 UK time.

We're keen to help you make your first pull request to PsychoPy in a friendly space ❤️

workshops.psychopy.org#workshop-my-...

Okay CTA. This is a good sign.

New paper out in JPSP with @erichehman.bsky.social! We asked: What is the framework underlying our impressions of environments? Our large bottom-up study shows that people pay attention to 4 factors. We’re calling it the Environment Impressions Model: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

I know the summer isn't quiiiiiite here yet (and those who are on the quarter system are cussing me out for even thinking about summer). But here is my Summer Writing Worksheet for those who use it! Share widely, please!
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s

Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

Back in 2019, TAing @yoavkessler.bsky.social's ANOVA course, I built #rstats tutorials w/@singmann.bsky.social's {afex} and {emmeans}.

I keep referring people to those materials as they basically give a complete overview of the analysis of factorial designs: joint tests, (interaction) contrasts...

GitHub - mattansb/Analysis-of-Factorial-Designs-foR-Psychologists: Lesson files used in the Analysis of Factorial Designs for Psychologists. Lesson files used in the Analysis of Factorial Designs for Psychologists. - mattansb/Analysis-of-Factorial-Designs-foR-Psychologists

We'll, it's now 2026 (👴🏻) and for absolutely no reason I've updated those materials to also demo analysis of factorial designs w/ #marginaleffects

(with a huge thanks to @vincentab.bsky.social for making this possible by accommodating my requests!)

Chapter 14 Data Cleaning | Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research Figure 14.1: Data cleaning in the research project life cycle. Even with the most well-designed data collection and capture efforts, data still require at least some additional processing before...

Data cleaning is often a personalized process — every dataset requires different wrangling steps. Yet, you can still use a list of common cleaning steps to guide your process and ensure those unique data sets are all wrangled consistently.

datamgmtinedresearch.com/clean

Wrapping up teaching my 7th year of graduate regression 🤯 Over the years I have developed a document I call the "Writing Guide to Linear Regression." I've made some updates to the inferences section, which I continue to develop. Have some good or bad examples? Send them my way! osf.io/egm3c/overview

1/ NEW in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology — our first review of a decade+ of research on understanding & predicting cultural change, with Michael Varnum.
This one is personal. A thread on what we found, what surprised us, and how two kids reading Asimov ended up here. 🧵

📣 The 2026 SMaRT Workshops schedule is officially LIVE — with workshops covering SEM, MLM, dyadic methods, time series, machine learning, clinical trials design, and more.

STATS NERD SUMMER is HERE.

Come learn something. 🧑‍🎓

smart-workshops.com/workshops

Please share and RP🙏

More info 👇

1/n

teach stats + do my own research*** best combo ever 🥹

i know that getting a job that lets me teach stats was the best choice because i was so sleepy doing admin work-->switched to doing some relevant stats readings for an analysis im planning and my excitement is off the charts‼️

Interested in attending the CPA Social & Personality pre-conference in Montreal on June 3rd? See below for more information!

forms.gle/vRp3zB3RRes2...

Oh BROTHER! The surprising impact of siblings YouTube video by The CRAM Podcast ~ Extraordinary Ideas Unleashed

Adolescence is a time of challenge and change. How can sibling relationships impact a child's development in those years? @arts_tmu professor Ryan Persram spoke to The CRAM Podcast about how siblings can help buffer adverse experiences in our youth. Watch:

What does it mean for culture to ‘shape’ cognition? Human culture and cognition vary widely across groups, but how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition remains underspecified. In this review, we outline four qualitatively different pathways by which culture can shape cognition. In this framework, culture can (i) privilege some cognitive processes, while leaving alternative processes intact; (ii) prune unused alternative processes, which are irretrievably lost; (iii) produce new cognitive processes; or (iv) have no effect on cognition at all. To illustrate the utility of this framework, we apply it to three debated effects of culture on cognitive processes, namely, visual illusions, large exact number abilities, and spatial–numerical associations. The distinctions we propose can serve to reframe long-standing debates, sharpen empirical predictions, and open new avenues of research in cognitive diversity.

Online Now: What does it mean for culture to ‘shape’ cognition?

Hello from the Culture Pre-Conference! 👋 #SPSP2026

Thanks to everyone who helped make the culture pre-conference a “successful failure!” We didn’t make the main pre-conference time, but we had a packed house and a great time. #SPSP2026

Excited to share that our lab will be presenting multiple projects at SPSP 2026!

If you’re interested in social perception, race talk, intergroup dynamics, or collective action — come check us out!

#SPSP2026 #SocialPsychology #PersonalityPsychology #AcademicResearch #RaceTalk

📣 PsychoPy Studio is out now!!

✨ Which also means swish new branding on psychopy.org ✨

We really hope that this improves user experience in general.

Please download and try it. Let us know how you get on via the forum discourse.psychopy.org/t/introducin...

Home Survey Experiments for the Scientific Study of Religion (SESSR) aims to improve our understanding of the measurement, impacts, and causes of religion, spirituality, and related concepts. SESSR accept...

Here's a great opportunity to conduct religion-related research at no cost on a high-quality survey panel (it uses random sampling to invite respondents).

One year after data is given to researchers, it will be made publicly available for further analysis.
www.sessr.org/home 🧪

A slide on the age-old question. One panel shows two buttons labelled Plot first? Fit first? The second panel shows a person wiping his head, with the caption, "I can plot-fit-plot"

I'm revising a lecture on extensions of logistic regression for my #psy6136 #CDA course and thought I'd share this slide on t he age-old question:

PLOT FIRST?
FIT FIRST?

It captures a course theme that data analysis is an iterative process, involving a loop of graphing and model fitting.

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted.
see our comment:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Job Opportunity at the University of Kent: Lecturer in Psychology The School of Psychology is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Psychology and a Lecturer in Psychology focusing on Cognition and Neuroscience  to join a collegial, supportive, and intellectually vibrant...

Kent Psychology is hiring 🎓We have two posts: 1) open area and 2) cog neuro. More details can be found here: jobs.kent.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... Feel free to reach out with questions!

Are you using experience sampling/ mobile sensing or are interested in incorporating these naturalistic methods? Are you going to SPSP? Are you 0-6 years post PhD?
Sign up to join the early career mentoring session at 4:30 PM on Friday 02/27! www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0C4EAB...

yesssss!!

Grad student: I think this draft is ready for your read

PI, after a quick skim: awesome, looking great I'll dig in now

PI, after an hour: I'm moving these sections around and revamping the discussion

PI, after several hours: I have made this paper into a boat and launched it into the moon