Great to see this finally out - I have been working on it since 2018, having carried out the first experiment for my undergrad dissertation research project!

Anchoring the anchor: judgments of both items assimilate in item-based anchoring Anchoring is a prominent judgment bias which causes people’s estimates of uncertain quantities to assimilate towards recently encountered values. Here…

Out now in Cognitive Psychology, paper spearheaded by @davidyoung-psych.bsky.social showing that questions like "Does a torch cost more or less than a laptop?" can generate mutual anchoring effects: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Academics have encountered issues in trying to establish whether polarisation is rising and why, primarily because it is hard to define polarisation and find ways to measure it. This #RSOS papers presents a new way of measuring polarisation using a machine learning algorithm: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

I was delighted to jointly win the Anne Treisman award 2025! For my paper on Bayesian polarisation, in Cognition: doi.org/10.1016/j.co... Thanks so much to @sjblakemore.bsky.social and the rest of the committee, and my co-authors @leede-wit.bsky.social and @jenskoedmadsen.bsky.social

In a blog, @davidyoung-psych.bsky.social, @leede-wit.bsky.social, and I discuss why perceived dependencies are so important to political belief formation - and how they might fuel polarisation.

It points to a broader discussion on how to engage with people politically.

shorturl.at/P2e2M

Belief polarization can be caused by disagreements over source independence: Computational modelling, experimental evidence, and applicability to real-world politics A large literature debates whether belief polarization, in both experiments and real-world political opinion data, is the result of biased forms of re…

In a new paper in Cognition w. @davidyoung-psych.bsky.social and @leede-wit.bsky.social, we explore perceived dependencies as a possible cause for issue polarisation.

We show that this is possible experimentally where high dependency depresses updating.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lovely news to hear today that my submission to #CogSci this year was accepted! Thanks to @cogscisociety.bsky.social!

First time on Blue Sky! Super happy this article is now out in an issue of Political Psychology! And honoured by the promo tweet with custom-made graphic! @leede-wit.bsky.social

New research by David Young and Lee de-Wit gives us a deeper look at polarization within political parties. Their findings suggest factional divides within a party can be as strong, and even stronger, than those between parties. Read more: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12973