BIG NEWS! Excited to officially announce the availability of my new book BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy.
www.redeemingdemocracy.net/p/officially...
My lab (u.osu.edu/spal/) and Ken Fujita’s lab (u.osu.edu/fujita/) at OSU are hiring a joint lab manager (a full-time postgraduate researcher) to start this summer!
Come work in two incredibly fun labs in a thriving social psychology department.
Application and more information soon to come!
Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026. Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.
Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics!
Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper.
More soon!
#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #PostDoc #SocialPsychology
My collaborator Rose Meleady is advertising a postdoc position
Requires expertise in intergroup contact/ESM studies
vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/21...
Rose is excellent -- high competence, high warmth. You'd won't find a better advisor!
Orbán rode to power on resentment over the economic stagnation that developed under center-left governments. But he leaves office with Hungarians facing falling wages and higher inflation than similar countries are experiencing. Orbán’s sectarianism and intolerance have sparked neither a religious revival nor a fertility bump; Hungary’s population is shrinking and has become more irreligious, even as Orbán has demonized LGBTQ people, “Muslim invaders,” and Jews. Orbánism, in short, did not make Hungarians more rich, Christian, or free—unless you happened to be one of Orbán’s buddies, in which case you may have gotten rich. As most Hungarians felt their economic circumstances worsen, Orbán provided them with relatively powerless targets to hate.
Orban made grand appeals to “Christianity” and “Western Civilization,” but his “illiberal democracy” was just a scam, a way to make him and his buddies rich while subjecting Hungarians to stagnation and robbing them of their freedom. Sound familiar? (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Trump is running an interesting experiment in how many self-identified Christian Americans have actual religious commitments and how many are just into it because it provides a means for the socially defensible expression of bigotry bsky.app/profile/bria...
I’m offering a lightly used set of regalia in UC Berkeley colors to a junior faculty member, preference for a mom and 1st gen scholar. DM me your details— I’ll ship for free.
I’ve been lucky to benefit from @drlarisa.bsky.social’s scholarship, friendship, and mentorship. There’s no doubt that her contributions to the field merit tenure at any institution. Fingers crossed the right academic home opens its doors! Also deeply appreciate the courage to normalize this.
Humanity did that. Science did that. Publicly-funded research did that. Excellent universities did that. Diversity did that. International cooperation did that.
Artemis II is a perfect example of what we can do at our best.
Welcome home, Integrity crew!
Yuppppp
Also..I feel like most bathtubs are kinda gross?
The Quiet Revival report was retracted after YouGov acknowledged problems with bogus survey respondents. In this NYT story, I comment on why the initial report got so much attention.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/europe/...
#AcademicSky
Meta-analysis on media portrayals of minority groups.
Finding equal sized effects for positive & negative portrayals.
And little moderation.
A panel of experts from multiple social science data archives—including the ARDA, @icpsr.bsky.social, @qdr.bsky.social, and @ropercenter.bsky.social—shared about resources that are widely available for teaching and learning about data. A recording of the workshop is available at the link below.
Scary how we've become so numb to the insanity that as our PRESIDENT threatens to destroy a "civilization" tonight....most of us carry on with our day as normal. It's sadly all too easy to see how the "good people" of the 1930s didn't do enough.
23 people could stop this genocidal war criminal. That’s it. 23.
20 Republican senators and 3 republican reps in the house and he’d be out of politics forever. But they won’t.
They’re addicted to power. A drug so strong they’d rather see a civilization die than give it up.
Are Christian protest events more or less violent? It depends.
In this new study, Joel Day finds Christian participation in right-leaning protest events associated with greater violence; but Christian participation in left-leaning events is "overwhelmingly peaceful."
doi.org/10.1111/jssr...
We are hiring 3 full-time lecturers in the English Department at University of Illinois at Chicago! 3/3 teaching load. Eligible for union membership (UICUF). Join us!
Concerned about the possible dismantling of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Directorate of NSF?? www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Find out what's happening and what we can do to protect behavioral science with @fabbs.org Friday April 10th at 1:30 ET. Register at us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
Our large-scale multi-analyst project is now out in Nature (@nature.com)! 🚨
Same data, different analysts → different results.
Analytical choices matter more than we assume, with implications for robustness in social & behavioral science.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
In light of the recent announcement to disband NSF's SBE program (which includes much of what would cover basic social psychology research), EMP Lab postdoc @amormino.bsky.social put together this advocacy resource guide. Please take a look, share, and let's advocate
www.paigeamormino.com/pages/9337
Postdoc opportunity at the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, for candidates with a background in social psychology, cognitive science, or social neuroscience. As a bonus, you get to work with @martinlangcz.bsky.social! www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a...
Updated versions of my misinformation and experiments course syllabi now posted:
Political Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories
sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/files/...
Experiments in Politics sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/files/...
@spssi.bsky.social friends, we have a male graduate student looking for someone to room with at this year's conference. If you happen to have a student interested in going/sharing a room to split costs, please let me know! Thanks!
Article abstract: How do collective memories of war shape inter-group social attitudes in post-conflict societies? Can the legacy of wartime violence hinder reconciliation for years or even decades after the conflict ends? While prior research shows that war memories influence a range of political processes and outcomes, their effects on how members of formerly opposing groups perceive one another remain underexplored. To address this gap, I conducted a survey experiment in post-war Bosnia, investigating whether the activation of these memories affects hostility toward out-groups. The results show that making war memories salient intensifies hostility, especially among individuals who personally experienced violence during the war. These findings suggest that deeply ingrained war memories pose a significant barrier to reconciliation, but their impact may gradually diminish through the generational replacement of the wartime population.
How do memories of wartime violence affect post-war inter-group attitudes? Dino Hadzic shows war memory activation increases hostility toward out-group members, especially among those who experienced violence firsthand. Read OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/YYghH81
@polstudiesassoc.bsky.social #polsky #polsci
RELIGION UNBUNDLED
Excited that this paper proposing a new paradigm for the sociology of US religion @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social, @jlkucinskas.bsky.social, @bsteens.bsky.social and I have been working on has been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review.
osf.io/preprints/so...
Never been more thankful to live in an age of credit cards! The shamefull self-promotion and groveling never ends.
This is an excellent paper! Insightful and theoretically important. I highly recommend it to folks interested
