PhD Position: Groups, Social Influence, and the Spread of Attitudes & Behaviors | Masaryk University

🚨 PhD position open — apply by 15 March 2026
Fully funded PhD on social influence, social networks, segregation, and the spread of attitudes & behaviors (start Oct 2026).
🔗 Details: www.muni.cz/en/about-us/...
📬 Please share!

#PhD #AcademicJobs #Psychology #SocialScience #SocialNetworks

Feynman_i_dont_like_honors_ [longer_version] YouTube video by batxg3

There's the way Trump is gleefully happy to accept someone else's Nobel prize, and then there's the way Richard Feynman viewed Nobel prizes.

🔗 More info & application:
5-year postdoc: www.muni.cz/o-univerzite...
3-year postdoc: www.muni.cz/o-univerzite...
I’m happy to chat if you’re unsure about fit or just curious.
I’d be grateful if you share the call!

#SocialNetworkAnalysis
#Psychology
#AcademicJobs
#Postdoc

✨ What you can expect
▪️long-term security (3 or 5 years)
▪️funding for conferences + research visits
▪️no required teaching (teaching possible if you’re interested)
▪️supportive, collaborative environment + space for your own ideas and preferences
▪️wonderful city (Brno really is great to live in)

If you’re interested in the following — how attitudes and behaviors spread between people, social influence, group dynamics, social networks, segregation, or data-based, theory-driven work — I’d really love to hear from you. You don’t need to tick every box.

🚨 Deadline approaching (Dec 15)
I’m hiring two postdocs to join me in Brno and help launch a new project on how segregation (clustering) shapes the spread of behaviors, within the Behaviors of Individuals and Groups (BIG) lab at Masaryk University.
📌 Two positions
5-year postdoc
3-year postdoc

🤯 Excited (and grateful) to have been awarded two grants: the GAČR Junior Star and the MASH Junior award from Masaryk University.
They will support new research on how segregation shapes the spread of attitudes and behaviors, and how we can better integrate psychology with a social network approach.

Oxford University Has Failed Women Over Harassment Concerns, Staff Say The university has repeatedly been slow to act against male academics accused of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior, a Bloomberg investigation found.

This—on my former university, department, and advisor—is harrowing but required reading for all social psychologists. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The deadline for the meeting on counterfactuals is coming up. Don't forget to send in your contribution.

In my opinion, it has been a lottery for a while. The worse thing is its biased nature.

4/4 🌱— Why this could be important?
1️⃣ More accurate prediction of how attitudes and behaviors spread.
2️⃣ Improving network interventions, especially those identifying central individuals.
3️⃣ Interaction between friendship influence and norms — e.g., when they pull adolescents in different directions.

3/4 👫We also examined ingroup vs outgroup friends — both influenced adolescents, in distinct ways. Focusing only on #friendships can miss who is influential and how change spreads. Studying friends + norms together offers a more accurate map of influence.

2/4 💡Have you tried to capture norms with networks?
We used longitudinal #SocialNetworks and SAOM to estimate friendship influence and group-based normative pressure in one framework — contributing to a clearer understanding of the channels through which change travels.
#NetworkScience
#socialpsych

1/4 📢 New paper in PSPB with Andreas Flache!

How do attitudes & behaviors spread?
#SocialInfluence among #adolescents isn’t just passed from friend to friend — it also flows through group norms. Both channels shaped academic drive, #prejudice, #religiosity.

👉DOI: 10.1177/01461672251366388

Does anyone know of a direct comparison between EU countries in terms of metrics used to evaluate universities and/or academic researchers? I'm especially interested in whether one can contrast countries that use N publications with those that don't. I suspect it's not so simple though

3-Year Postdoc Position on the EU co-funded project „On our own: opportunities and risks of individualising society” at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno 3-Year Postdoc Position on the EU co-funded project „On our own: opportunities and risks of individualising society” at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno Deadline: June 30...

🚨 3-year postdoc opening in Brno (Czechia)!
Join Sylvie Graf and me to study polarization & intergenerational relations.

Start: Sept 2025 (flexible)
📅 Deadline: June 30

More details here:

euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/349285

Please help spread the offer.

#postdoc #psychology

Some 100 private jets will fly to Venice for Jeff Bezos' wedding, and I recycle yoghurt cup lids.

3-Year Postdoc Position on the EU co-funded project „On our own: opportunities and risks of individualising society” at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno 3-Year Postdoc Position on the EU co-funded project „On our own: opportunities and risks of individualising society” at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno Deadline: June 30...

🚨 3-year postdoc opening in Brno (Czechia)!
Join Sylvie Graf and me to study polarization & intergenerational relations.

Start: Sept 2025 (flexible)
📅 Deadline: June 30

More details here:

euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/349285

Please help spread the offer.

#postdoc #psychology

The network dynamics of antiprejudice norms: A field experiment testing antiprejudice interventions in real groups Individuals' attitudes toward members of ethnic and national outgroups can be shaped by peer norms within social networks. However, little is known about the interplay between such spontaneous normat...

Check out our registered report @ispp-pops.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/pops..., in which we present a four-wave field experiment combined with network analysis. We cannot make it without our social network expert @tzingora.bsky.social and my PhD supervisors @pruthie.bsky.social and Daan Scheepers!

📢 Call for Abstracts for the Annual Meeting of the Network for Empirical-Analytical Social Research on Muslims (NAFS) on September 15 & 16 @goetheuni.bsky.social in Frankfurt, Germany.

Call is here: www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/170436331/Cf...?

Thanks for sharing! 👍

Job opportunities 2 PhD Vacancies “Partnership Trajectories and Intergenerational Relations”

📢 PhD Opportunity at Masaryk University! 🎓 We seek 2 PhD students for the PRINS project on partnership trajectories & intergenerational relations. Apply by 31.03.2025! More info here: soc.fss.muni.cz/aktuality/jo...

Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.

Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.

We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.

King's launches the Atlas of Longitudinal Datasets to support mental health research Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London have launched a new free platform to allow people to discover hundreds of longitudinal mental hea...

King's College London launches the Atlas of Longitudinal Datasets, in partnership with @wellcometrust.bsky.social / @mqmentalhealth.bsky.social, a free platform with over 1,600 datasets, to support mental health research worldwide. 🌍

Read more and learn how to access: www.kcl.ac.uk/news/kings-l...

5/5 Social network analysis is an exciting way to study intergroup contact. Curious about what comes next!

4/5 Social influence from friends was crucial! When we acknowledge that adolescents are influenced by friends' prejudice in the first place, having outgroup friends might no longer matter for prejudice. Plus, just exposure to outgroup peers positively shaped outgroup attitudes.

3/5 In longitudinal data, I found a negative link between outgroup friends and outgroup attitudes, as usual. However, SAOM studies typically include an additional factor: social influence. Adolescents might change their attitudes in the direction of their friends' attitudes.

2/5 Do SAOM studies really find no evidence for the link between intergroup friendship and outgroup attitudes? To answer this question, I conducted a meta-analysis that confirmed this puzzle.

1/5 ⚡️Paper alert🧩Puzzle: social network studies (SAOM) often find no effect of having outgroup friends on prejudice in schools.💡Reason? Accounting for the social influence of friends. 🔍An outgroup size was linked to lower prejudice. [Link](https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12797

4/4 💡The exposure to outgroup peers - the number of outgroup peers in a school grade - had a positive effect on the development of outgroup attitudes.