2022 Year in Review
Read our Year-in-Review highlights from all our work from 2022; Join a collaboration with our lab!
Here is a recap of our newsletters this year and the most interesting discoveries in our lab! In case you missed any of our newsletters this year, simply click on the title to read more.
Cartoon from Roz Chast
The biggest news in January wss that we published our biggest collaboration to date in Nature Communications, with over 250 authors from around the globe. How much do you identify with your country? Our new paper shows how this may predict your response to the pandemic.
February: The case for adversarial collaboration
In February, we discussed the benefits of adversarial collaborations, the psychology of Putin's Russian Trolls, and why it's hard to generalize findings from moral and political psychology.
March: The psychology of conspiracy theorists
In March, we explored the psychological factors that influence belief in conspiracy theories. Our studies find that people are drawn to conspiracy theories based on their qualities and content, and that these motivations can drive different types of movements and political behavior.
April: Are humans intuitively cooperative or selfish?
This month, we explained how neurons, norms, & institutions shape the decision to cooperate. Our paper finds that a comprehensive approach is needed to understand cooperation, including a value-based framework that considers cognitive, social, and institutional factors, as well as outcomes, probability, and social preferences, in order to understand how psychological and environmental factors affect cooperative decisions.
May: The role of identity leadership on January 6th
What the 2021 insurrection can teach us about social identity and leadership? In a paper for Leadership Quarterly, we argued that this binary view of leadership fails to reflect the complex relationship between leaders and their followers, and the psychological processes that were at play on Capitol Hill in January 2021.
In June, we discussed online news consumption & the surprising story behind our new analysis of 22,743 experiments. We found that negative words had a positive effect on click-through rate for online news consumption, while positive words had a negative effect on click-through rate. This suggests that a larger proportion of negative words increases the tendency of online users to access a news story.
July: Social identity shapes your belief in fake news
In July, we discussed how partisanship influences fake news belief and sharing. We found a clear partisan bias in belief of fake news, meaning participants were more likely to believe fake news when it came from their political in-group vs out-group or a neutral source.
August: The morality of liberal vs. conservative kids
The highlight of August was research that explaining how kids use group identity to punish others. We found that parents’ political ideology predicted who children punished. Children with more liberal parents tended to punish in-group members, whereas those with more conservative parents tended to punish out-group members.
September: Using Science to Help Save Democracy
We joined the “Strengthening Democracy Challenge”, which tested the best interventions for restoring a commitment to civil society. From 252 submissions, our intervention, called the “common identity” based intervention, was the third most effective intervention at reducing partisan animosity (with an effect size of d = 0.46), and the fifth most effective intervention at reducing support for undemocratic practices.
October: What goes viral on social media vs. what people want to go viral
In October, we described our study on what does vs. should go viral on social media, as well as our paper evaluating expectations from social and behavioral science about COVID-19 by rigorously examining 742 scientific articles on human behavior during the COVID pandemic.
November: The psychology of hate
What differentiate hate from dislike or even extremely dislike? While the more obvious answer is the difference between their degree of negativity, our research finds that morality is also a key ingredient that distinguishes people’s conceptualizations of hate and dislike.
December: Social identity shapes morality
What dominates moral cognition: intuition or reason? This is a question that has launched countless philosophical debates and moral psychology studies. In our latest paper, we move beyond this longstanding debate and make the case the identity is at the heart of moral decision-making.
Join our lab!
In addition to wrapping up the year, we want to share an opportunity to collaborate with our lab. We are working on a grant on social decision-making. Hallgeir Sjastad, one of the lead investigators on the project, is looking to hire a PhD student for a position at the Norwegian School of Economics (Application deadline January 15th; salary is $50,000/year).