Very proud of my newest research student, Justice Wilbourn, who will be joining the BORG Lab in Fall 2026. Justice just earned a competitive Sinclair undergraduate research grant to support a project on parental influences on political attitudes (with Dr. Nic Bussberg and me).
Congrats, Justice! 👏
Sophie Verrecchia presenting her poster at NCUR to two audience members.
Sophie Verrecchia, Dr. Adi Wiezel, and Abram Darby (clockwise) showing off their black and green beaded bracelets that say “BORG” on them, after the lab’s acronym.
On Wednesday afternoon, Sophie Verrecchia presented her project examining mate (romantic partner) preferences among lesbian women and straight men.
Congratulations to both on reaching this important research milestone! 👏
(And, as a bonus: the lab bracelets I made to celebrate the occasion! ☺️).
Abram Darby and Sophie Verrecchia enjoying fresh spring rolls at Mekong Restaurant.
Dr. Adi Wiezel, Sophie Verrecchia, and Abram Darby discussing poster presentations at a table outside of Mekong Restaurant.
Abram Darby standing proudly in front of his NCUR poster.
After some practice sessions (and a great lab dinner at Mekong Restaurant on Monday evening), Abram Darby kicked things off on Tuesday morning with his poster on childcare motives and leadership preferences.
Dr. Adi Wiezel, Sophie Verrecchia, and Abram Darby smiling in front of Sophie’s NCUR poster.
Delighted that I got to spend some time in Richmond, VA earlier this week supporting two of my outstanding seniors as they presented their research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). Both projects reflect some of the more independent work they’ve been doing in the BORG Lab.
Too real 😂
Thanks for the heads up!
And that’s a wrap for my #SPSP2026 talk summaries this year. Thanks for sharing all that neat work, y’all! ☺️
In a followup study, a number of political polarization interventions were not found to be successful at pushing around any of the three types of moral convinction, which may suggest that these aspects of moral conviction are more trait-like in nature.
Notably, *not* all types of moral conviction were associated with moral absolutism or ant democratic attitudes. Inparty moralization, for example, was most strongly associated with positive partisanship and the centrality of one’s party identification.
@icedteas.bsky.social presented interesting work at #SPSP2026 suggesting that (political) moral conviction seems to have three distinct facets, focused on: inparty moralization, moralized disagreement, and moralized character judgment (for being a member of the outparty).
My pleasure. It was a neat talk on some interesting work!
In fact, the “assumed” moral foundation intervention actually backfired among participants who were more conservative—for them, it was actually associated with *reduced* climate concern.
Interestingly, presenting participants with messages emphasizing their preferred moral foundation also seemed to increase their climate concern more than did messages with leveraging their assumed moral foundation (fairness for liberals, purity for conservatives).
Moreover, messages that emphasized participants’ top chosen moral foundation seemed to be associated with increased climate concern among *both* liberals and conservatives (who believe in climate change).
Although conventional explanations of partisan attitude differences typically emphasize relative differences in partisan values (as indexed by moral foundations), results suggested that when partisans were asked to select their top value, liberals & conservatives alike overwhelmingly chose “care.”
@diegoreinero.bsky.social presented some thought-provoking work at #SPSP2026 showing that American partisans seem to be most attitudinally polarized on climate issues, in particular.
@jakewomick.bsky.social presented interesting work at #SPSP2026 investigating the prejudices of extreme leftists, finding that they were negatively prejudiced against men and Jewish people; prejudices associated with (and mediated by) perceptions that these groups are harmful and powerful.
(2) those with more densely connected belief systems (such as ideologues) tend to have more moralized belief systems.
Specifically, she presented one study using simulation data, and three additional studies using conceptual similarity tasks, with results suggesting that (1) moral conviction spreads from highly moralized nodes to closely connected neighboring beliefs/attitudes and…
In the #SPSP2026 symposium she chaired, @abbycassario.bsky.social presented work investigating how attitudes get pulled into the moral domain; while prior explanations have focused on emotions and intra-attitudinal features, she suggested researchers should also consider *inter*-attitude structures.
Specifically, a 1 standard deviation increase in the persuasiveness of a debate was associated with a 19% increase in Chat GPT-detected intellectual humility.
Content analyses of 438,723 comments on 90 debate videos suggested that comments were most intellectually humble when the debate featured (1) persuasive arguments and (2) a debate moderator.
In a replication study, focused on a more politicized issue—defunding the police—the debate condition was only associated with more intellectual humility than the no video control.
Additionally, the informational video on rent control (which also presented new information), was associated with greater intellectual humility among participants than the no video control condition.
In an interesting #SPSP2026 talk, @abdoe.bsky.social presented data showing that assigning participants to watch a debate (versus an informational video, or no video) on rent control made them significantly more intellectually humble.
In addition, in 7/9 countries (all but South Africa and Israel), religious nationalism was associated with greater support for political violence; and in 9/9 countries, religious nationalism was associated with greater support for undemocratic practices.
Interesting research presented by Zarnab Zahoor at #SPSP2026 found that across 9 democracies (7 Christian-majority, 1 Hindu-majority, and 1 Jewish-majority), all samples showed a positive association between religious nationalism and conservatism (this effect was especially pronounced in the U.S.).
and the Bible study condition was associated with significantly more compassion toward others than the guided meditation/breathing exercise.
Another study had participants either complete a 15-minute Bible study or guided meditation exercise; although the conditions did not differ on subsequent measures of affective polarization, both conditions showed outparty feeling thermometer scores that were notably warmer than national averages,
Why did having many outpartisans in church not have a stronger reductive effect on affective polarization? Follow-up analyses suggested that an overabundance of outpartisans seemed to be associated with more social isolation and political concealment at church.