Reopening the Social Identity & Morality lab
As life returns to a state of semi normalcy in NYC, our lab hosted its first hybrid lab meeting. Learn about our latest research, skills workshops, and news.
We’re so glad to have you here! Each month, we’ll be sharing updates about our lab’s research, presentations, resources, events, opportunities, and news about the lab. We have a brand new lab website, but figured that people might prefer a monthly email to checking it regularly or spending too much time on social media.
Stay tuned to learn more about our work and please share with anyone who might find this useful.
Publications
Behind the scenes, things have been bubbling as well. We have a few new publications we are excited to share.
The first paper was led by Katrine Nødtvedt and Hallgeir Sjåstad at the Norwegian School of Economics, and examined ways to reduce racial bias in the sharing economy:
Our new GPIR paper, by Andrea Pereira, Elizabeth Harris, and Jay Van Bavel, explored the effects of political identity on the willingness to spread misinformation:
The third paper, discussed the urgent need for an interdisciplinary study of collective behavior, treating the field as a crisis discipline. If you follow the thread below, you can see that Nate Silver tried to dunk on our paper:
Our fourth paper was led by our incoming postdoc, Steve Rathje, and examined what goes viral on Twitter and Facebook in a massive sample of online messages. We found that each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. We also replicated our moral-contagion effect, although dunking on your enemies appeared to be more effective (and might be especially satisfying for folks like Nate Silver when they get to dunk on academics!)
Book
As you may know, Jay is putting the final touches on a book with Dominic Packer that will come out in September. It highlights a lot of great research from current and former lab members. You can learn more at our book website and sign up for the weekly newsletter if you want to learn about the book, along with events.
Workshops
The Social Identity and Morality Lab’s first lab meeting of the summer was extra special this year: not only was it the first in-person lab meeting since the pandemic hit NYC, but it was also hosted with Tessa West's Interpersonal Perception Lab.
Ashley Lynn Weinberg led a workshop on R Markdown, a type of script in R that allows you to create clean and visually appealing outputs. We’ve uploaded a recording of the workshop on our lab Youtube Channel.
The following week Claire Robertson gave a very helpful presentation on how to make your Qualtrics programming far more efficient using R.
In the news
Some of our work made it in the news this month. This paper on intergroup dynamics on social media, led by Steve Rathje, was covered by the BBC:
Our international collaboration on COVID-19 with 233 co-authors was also covered by Nature Magazine. Stay tuned for more big collaborations from the lab in the future!
At the start of the month, Kim Doell put together a nice summary of our recent paper on misinformation in the digital age for the SPSSI Newsletter:
We recently shared our research on COVID-19 in a briefing to the White House:
Lab hike
After 16 months of sedentary activity, our lab decided to embark on a hike in Blue Mountain Loop in the peaks of New York's Hudson Highlands. Our two new visiting scholars, Steven Rathje (Trinity College, Cambridge) and Clara Pretus (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), joined the 7-mile hike. As things return to normal, we hope to host more fun lab adventures. (Psst: let us know if you have any ideas!)
Upcoming Month
We’ll continue to host joint lab meetings with Tessa West’s Interpersonal Perception lab for the summer. We’ll be covering some super helpful topics, and will upload all presentations to our lab Youtube channel for you to check out! If you’re interested in attending, please send a message to our lab manager at nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com
Next month, we will create a form to make it easy for lab members and alumni to share any news with our monthly newsletter. We are just getting started, so let us know if there are other elements you’d like to see in future letters.
In case you missed the newsletter from last month:
Thanks for reading—we’ll see you next month!