WOW: Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak have the memos that describe the origins of SCOTUS shadow docket - the 2016 order halting Obama’s Clean Power Plan @jodikantor.bsky.social @adamliptak.bsky.social @nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
An image of the article "Desistance": A Multimethod Review of the Literature on Gender Identity Variability in Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth
New publication alert! After four years of analysis, synthesis, and careful writing, I am pleased to announce a brand-new article, “Desistance”: A Multimethod Review of the Literature on Gender Identity Variability in Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth (1) 🧵
psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
At its core, the political economy of scholarship was never supposed to rely on ~$50k from a smelting fortune. Institutions have hollowed out their support, the feds have done the same, and all that's left is inadequate private funding.
Currently in FirstView: In “From Faces to Politics: Vision-Language Models (Sometimes) Link Visual Demographic Characteristics to Ideological Labels,” S. Jeon, M. Lee, @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social, and @calvinklai.bsky.social ask how models use demographics as shortcuts for ideological attribution.
The Deconstructing Intergroup Social Cognition (DISCO) Lab is hiring a full-time lab coordinator! 🚨🚨🚨 Come work with us at Boston College. Interested in applying?
Start date: August 1st, 2026
Apply here: drive.google.com/file/u/2/d/1...
97% (positive results) vs 80%(null results) chance of reviewer recommending acceptance
Each year, people speak 338 less words per day (on average). These effects accumulate. In 2019, people were speaking 28% less words each day than in 2005 (!).
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...
Online hostility is predicted by economic & political inequality
Inequality breeds online hostility because people crave status in unequal societies and status-seekers constitute the main perpetrators of hostility in political settings, whether online or offline.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The targeted defunding of science on diversity, equity, & inclusion means that we'll all know less about the world outside our window. @alanyhyu.bsky.social reports on what that looks like at the science nonprofit, Project Implicit (@projectimplicit.bsky.social)
whyy.org/articles/soc...
SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.
A line graph showing awards over time at NSF's SBE. The line for this year, 2026, is extremely FLAT compared to prior years. By this time in 2025, 179 grants had been awarded. In 2021, it was 243. This year... 16.
NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October.
No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out.
Why...?
1/x
source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
🟦🧠 #academicsky
OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org
It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The best and brightest young people from around the world are getting the message: Reconsider investing your talents in the United States.
Cumulative issuance of F-1 student visas by calendar month, down circa 32% as of September (latest available)
Source: travel.state.gov/content/trav...
$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025
Who were most affected?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Early career and women researchers
‘While state and federal prosecutors have sent record numbers of people to prison for violent crimes and property- and drug-related offenses, the US retreated from prosecuting and punishing white-collar crime, despite a tsunami of elite-level wrongdoing.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
Building affordable housing ➡️ support for funding housing.
Nearby homeowners ⬆️ support; renters ⬇️ support. Both are “the policy adjacent”—secondhand recipients & drivers of policy feedback.
Forthcoming @ajpseditor.bsky.social ( doi.org/10.1111/ajps...) w/ A. Magazinnik & @msands.bsky.social 1/9
I've seen a lot of demoralized posts (and emails) from people who didn't get into grad school this cycle.
This was one of the worst cycles I've ever seen due to massive cuts to research funding, financial difficulties at universities, and technological disruptions.
There are big political and intergeneratonal differences in what people think is morally wrong
For example, Gen Z are 3X more likely than Boomers to see being extremely rich and 2X more likely to see spanking children as morally wrong
www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...
Entertaining and interesting post by @kurtjgray.bsky.social on how science works using his own research on moral psychology in contrast to @jonathanhaidt.bsky.social's work.
Hegemonic suicide, a play in many parts
abstract: While attempts to change Americans’ partisanship via persuasive treatments largely fail, partisanship can and does change over time. In this paper, the authors first confirm, via survey and field experiments, that typical campaign messaging in the United States does not budge partisanship. The authors then present experiments in which participants encounter extraordinary hypothetical scenarios (e.g. one party causes economic collapse) before reporting what their partisanship would be under such circumstances. Twelve percent of partisans imagine switching parties in the pro-out-party hypothetical conditions, compared with 5% in the control hypotheticals in which the status quo persists, for a seven-percentage point (SE 1.5 points) difference. These hypothetical shifts are on par with the largest changes in American macropartisanship ever recorded. While the act of ruminating on hypothetical scenarios is not followed by changes in partisanship measured post-treatment, the evidence suggests that extraordinary world events may be able to shift partisan affiliation.
New paper with Don Green and @ethanvporter.bsky.social in the QJPS. After much deliberation, we went with a title that just states the result. 📝
journal: www.emerald.com/qjps/article...
New short paper w @jkalla.bsky.social !
Candidates gain from moderation, but less than many theories expect.
Many conclude voters must not care about issues.
This is wrong. Small *average* effects mask large effects on specific issues & are consistent with widespread issue-based voting 🧵
‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ Director: “This is about how you lose your country — through small acts of complicity: when a government murders people on the streets, when oligarchs take over the media… we all face a moral choice. But even a nobody is more powerful than you think."
What happens when the DOJ stops fighting for civil rights? @nytimes.com follows Kristie Metcalfe, a woman who faced pay inequality & retaliation. She had a strong discrimination case, but was abandoned as civil rights enforcement was dismantled from within.
Listen: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/p...
I end my talk these days by reminding the audience that for most scientists, their politics aren't biasing the science, the science is informing their politics. But b/c scientific conclusions are inconvenient for right-wing politics, there is a movement to pretend the causal arrow is reversed.
Conditionally accepted at the APSR (w/ @scottclifford.bsky.social & @patrickpliu.bsky.social):
Why does political information so often change beliefs but NOT attitudes? We highlight the role of belief relevance, or the extent to which beliefs bear on attitudes.
