While "diversity" is slowly becoming a forbidden word it is increasingly important to uphold the principles of diversity.

Tomorrow the Early Career Committee of the @polpsyispp.bsky.social is organising an online roundtable on the minority voices in political psychology.

Come join us!

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching.

Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

The article only mentions the case of Malta but at least Greece has a similar scheme..

👇 Link to the article: doi.org/10.1111/pops...

Also check out a previous article revealing a similar pattern for conspiracy beliefs and (anti-)democratic attitudes: doi.org/10.1111/bjso... which was not advertised due to social media limbo in the post-Musk X era. 🙃
#Populism #Democracy #Autocracy

🧭 We hope this work not only advances academic discussions in the study of populism, but also informs efforts to counter the autocratization trend that we currently see.

Big thanks to a great team of collaborators Sam Slewe & Jan-Willem van Prooijen, and Kostas Papaioannou who spearheaded the work.

✅ In all, conflating populism & autocracy is short-sighted. Citizen disillusionment does not inevitably lead them toward authoritarianism. Democratic actors could try to "fill the gap" through meaningful reforms, (enhancing social justice or political power & introducing direct-democratic practices)

🧠Psychologically, two distinct populist elements explain this duality: a desire for social justice ("returning power to the people"), fuels support for democratic alternatives; feelings of powerlessness ("the elites, not the people, have the power"), open the door to more autocratic preferences.

On the one hand, people with strong populist views tend to reject representative democracy —the system most countries use today.

Yet, the same individuals support more alternative systems, both autocratic regimes and direct democracy. Disillusionment with the status-quo seems to be the culprit.

📰 In a new article @ispp-pops.bsky.social we explore how populist attitudes relate to citizens' political preferences —both pro- and anti-democratic.

🔍We confirm a key paradox: populism is not unequivocally linked to either democratic or anti-democratic preferences

👇https://tinyurl.com/mrbneksu

Bust of Andrey Sakharov

Science is under a wide-ranging attack in the U.S. From arbitrary and catastrophic funding cuts to censorship based on keywords, scholarship is no longer free from government interference. How can scientists respond? 1/n

Pretty ironic the EC feels like it needs to "stress test" and "talk to X" after the events of the last days, weeks, months..Is more evidence needed for direct and intentional interference by the very chief/CEO of X?