I also made a guide with my tips for applying to post-bacc and phd positions and the applications I used: helendevine.academicwebsite.com/pages/9373
join the slack for post-bacc jobs here 🫶: join.slack.com/t/postbacc-p...
pls share widely to help make psych more accessible for new, great minds 🤓
if you're looking for a position: join and browse.
if you're in the field (grad students, PIs, lab managers): join and drop links as you see them. takes 2 seconds, can mute notifs, or just forward to me and I can share!
psych post-bacc jobs are scattered across wikis, twitter/bsky, and random lab sites. hard to find if you're not already in the field.
I started a slack to pool them in one place — a low-effort bulletin board, channels by subfield, updated live!
🔗⬇️
Thank you so much!
None of this would have been possible without my amazing mentors — especially @kurtjgray.bsky.social, Amie Gordon, and Robin Edelstein. So grateful for your guidance and investment in my growth as a researcher. 🫶
Thrilled to share I'll be starting a PhD in Psychology at Yale this fall with Melissa Ferguson — and that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support my work!
Can't wait to get started! 🥳
#NSFGRFP
🚨 New paper in Personality and Individual Differences!
We introduce the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS): a 10-item measure of the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm.
Who believes that words can harm, and what does this belief predict?🧵 ⬇️
We noticed a broad trend: liberals tended to amplify group differences in vulnerability (the environment and othered are VERY vulnerable and the powerful and divine are VERY invulnerable) whereas conservatives viewed all groups as more equally vulnerable to suffering.
Check out what people are saying about our paper on r/science: www.reddit.com/r/science/co...
And huge shoutout to the co-authors that are on here! @jakewomick.bsky.social @emilykubin.bsky.social @helenldevine.bsky.social @keithpayne.bsky.social @kurtjgray.bsky.social
This past weekend, I attended @ap-ls.org in Reno, Nevada and presented a poster on the co-occurrence of true crime consumption & victim-blaming attitudes. 🧪⚖️ #apls2026
Link to the poster: helendevine.academicwebsite.com/projects/705...
From research with @kurtjgray.bsky.social !
Last month, I presented my poster on how true crime consumption relates to victim blaming at #SPSP2026 in Chicago — and I'm so honored to have received the Best Poster Award at the Moral Psychology pre-conference! 🎉
One week left to submit to the Mind & Machine Alignment Summit! ⏳
Propose a talk, experience, or project idea by March 16.
We have a phenomenal lineup of speakers doing cutting-edge work in this space, and we’re excited to hear your ideas!
Check out the attached infographic for a quick summary of our work.
with @kurtjgray.bsky.social @emilykubin.bsky.social ✍️
🔗 doi.org/10.1177/2372...
Cover page of a journal article titled "The Psychology of Victimhood in the Law"
⚖️ New paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences!
Legal decisions hinge on who counts as a victim — but our judgments are biased & hard to change. We propose solutions: victim impact statements, funding restorative justice, & acknowledgments for exonerees.
✍️ New Preprint:
"Sticks and stones may break my bones..." but can words really harm?
We created the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS) to measure the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm.
You can take the online assessment here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...
Full preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Great project to work on w/ @danicajdillion.bsky.social & @kurtjgray.bsky.social !
(with all of that being said... this is my [s̶o̶u̶l̶m̶a̶t̶e̶] dog Finn. 😆)
Study 3: Surprisingly, even some non-dog owners chose dogs > people in our moral dilemmas.
Valuing and treating dogs as soulmates may be an element of our culture: whether you own a dog or not.💡
(cont.) Those who saw their dog as a soulmate were more likely to choose dogs > people in every moral dilemma we presented--giving dogs food, money, and saving their life over humans. ⚖️
This effect was stronger for childfree dog owners. 🚫👶
Study 2: About 3 out of 4 dog owners we surveyed (73%) viewed their dog as a primary emotional soulmate.
When presented with a moral dilemma, more than one in five owners (21%) chose to save a puppy's life over a human stranger. 😳
Study 1: National spending on pets is strongly negatively correlated with the birth rate (r = -.93; controlling for GDP). This replicated at the county level.
Less babies born = more 💸 spent on pets, which may suggest a caregiving trade-off.
New preprint: Do people care more about their pet dog than about other people? 🐶 > 🫂
Our findings suggest that increases in "soulmate" emotional reliance on dogs is associated with reduced moral concern for people. 🧵
@kurtjgray.bsky.social @daviddesteno.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social @josephfridman.bsky.social @marycmurphy.bsky.social @andyluttrell.bsky.social
This week's Science to Impact symposium at Ohio State hosted experts in all kinds of science communication!
Grateful to have helped organize this event and heard from these minds in one room. 🧠 🧪
Smile if you’re moving to Columbus!!
It was a great year at UNC. This summer, @mshastry.bsky.social and I are moving with @kurtjgray.bsky.social ’s Deepest Beliefs Lab to Ohio State! Excited to join.
(forever Go Blue, though 🤗〽️)
✍️ with @kurtjgray.bsky.social and @sampratt99.bsky.social
moralunderstanding.substack.com/p/strip-club...
New post: What do a physicist in a strip club, a pop star in a church, and government officials making war plans in a group chat have in common? 🔬🎤💣
The setting is all wrong—so wrong that their decisions start to feel immoral.
(🔗 in thread)
Last month, I attended @aplssc.bsky.social in sunny San Juan! 🌤️ #APLS2025
I presented work showing that humans are worse at judging guilt based on walking style than a computer algorithm trained on the same dataset.
w/ @kurtjgray.bsky.social
Poster: tinyurl.com/devineposter...
Woohoo!!
2) We find evidence that people who worry more about crime 😨 are more likely to blame victims. 🫵 This may be a self-protective strategy to gain control over potential victimhood.
Poster: tinyurl.com/devineposter...
w/ @kurtjgray