At the new newsletter, we will explain the science of belonging, conflict, and cooperation in the digital age. This will include summaries of our recent research, media coverage and outreach, educational materials, interviews with authors and other scholars on these topics, and applications of this research to real world issues–with a focus on the lessons of this work for fostering healthier individuals, organizations, communities, and societies. We also believe this will become one of the largest newsletters on social psychology.

By combining these two newsletters, we’ll be able to deliver deeper coverage and more frequent content right to your inbox. All of our Center newsletters will remain free to access–including the monthly summary of our latest research. If you want extra content, there will also be a paid subscription option where you can get access to bonus content created by The Power of Us, including longer, more in-depth articles and regular meetings with Jay (and his co-author Dominic Packer).

To make this transition easy, you don’t need to do anything. Your current subscription will automatically be transferred to the free version of The Power of Us, newsletter so you won’t miss a beat.

Thank you to each and every subscriber who has followed our work. We hope to see you over at The Power of Us | In collaboration with the Center for Conflict and Cooperation!

News and Announcements

In other news:

Jay was mentioned in a Times of India article and an Economic Times article about the number one career skill you can gain—accepting constructive criticism. You can read the full articles here and here.

Last month, our Center hosted a pair of conferences in Florence. The first focused on strengthening democracy and the second was on science of conflict and cooperation (and included several alumni of our lab). Check out the photo below:

Our postdoc Steve Rathje also posted a TikTok about our Center’s recent conference in Florence! You can watch it here and follow Steve here.

Former visiting scholar Mathias Twardawski received the 2025 ISJR Early Career Contributions award, which is given to an “accomplished young researcher…to foster, encourage, and support excellence in justice-related scholarship.” Congratulations to Mathias!

Our paper “The impact of generative artificial intelligence on socioeconomic inequalities and policy making”, led by our collaborator Valerio Caprero, is the 4th most read paper on PNAS Nexus for this year! If you want to read the article, you can do so here.

Jay was a panelist for NYU Langone’s “Health and… Social Media” conference, where he talked about the effects of social media on mental health and population health. Check out the photos below, and watch the full talk here!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

The Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU

Behind the Scenes of the Consensus Statement on Potential Negative Impacts of Smartphone and Social Media Use

Is social media ruining a generation…

Read more

10 months ago · 4 likes · Center for Conflict + Coop.

That’s a wrap, folks! We hope to see you at the Power of Us.

Over the years, psychologists have created several different measures of intellectual humility. This poses a “jingle-jangle” problem for the field—where we have many terms for the same phenomenon, or the same terms to describe slightly different phenomena. These measures often overlap with one another and sometimes measure things inconsistently. For example, one might ask if you "welcome different ideas,” while another asks if you “are open to competing ideas.” Are those the same thing? Or different? It’s unclear. This confusion makes it hard for researchers to compare studies or build a clear understanding of how intellectual humility works.

To resolve this debate in the literature, we created the Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility (CIIH) Scale. In a recent preprint, we conducted ten studies with nearly 6,000 people to combine the best parts of these existing tools into one, comprehensive measure. Our scale focuses not just on how humble people are in general, but we also added a measure of intellectual humility in group-based settings, like politics, religion, or race—where tensions and defensiveness can run high.

The following items assessed the disposition to turn a critical eye to the epistemic practices and standards of one’s ingroup: “To avoid group-think, it’s important to be extra critical of your own group’s ideas” and “I go out of my way to turn a critical eye on my own group’s beliefs”. If you strongly agree with these items, you score high on the ingroup criticism segment of intellectual humility.

The final CIIH includes five key traits:

1. Open-mindedness – being open to new perspectives and evidence.

2. Intellectual defensiveness – reacting emotionally or negatively to disagreement.

3. Intellectual arrogance – not caring about being wrong or learning new things.

4. Sense of intellectual superiority – believing you or your group are just smarter.

5. Ingroup criticism – being willing to question or challenge your own group.

Together, these cover both individual traits and social dynamics — like how we handle disagreement with outsiders or loyalty to our own group. The figure below shows the correlation between the five key traits of Intellectual Humility, along with several other cognitive and political measures.

You can read the full preprint here. This paper was led by Philip Pärnamets, Jay Van Bavel, and Mark Alfano.

Pärnamets, P., Van Bavel, J. J., & Alfano, M. (2025). Consolidating the measurement of intellectual humility: The Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility (CIIH) scale. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ug756_v2

As faithful readers will know, we are testing out changes to our newsletter to see what our audience likes the best. Have you read this newsletter up to this point?

In case you missed our last newsletter:

We also posted a summary/preview of the podcast below created by Derek Thompson:

I’m very concerned about the relationship between smartphone use and America’s mental health crisis. But many researchers don’t see things my way. They insist that there is little to no empirical data showing that smartphone and social media use drives up anxiety or depression.

So what’s the truth about smartphones, social media, and mental health? That’s the question that the NYU researcher Jay Van Bavel set out to answer with his collaborator Valerio Capraro. They took dozens of claims about smartphones, sent them to hundreds of experts in the field, and asked them whether these claims were probably true, probably false, or unknown—and why. The result was a massive survey, one of the largest of its kind in the history of psychology. Today, Van Bavel joins the show to tell us what he found, what surprised him, and why his consensus survey made so many researchers so angry.

In the following excerpt, Derek and Jay Van Bavel talk through the background and methodology for the expert survey Van Bavel and Valerio Capraro conducted on the impacts of social media.

Derek Thompson: Listeners might remember that you starred in one of my favorite episodes of this show, the four dark laws of online engagement. That’s a show that I think about all the time, about the ways that the psychology of user behavior on the internet might be driving all of us crazy. Before we get to this, I thought, really fascinating piece of research, just remind folks who you are and what you do.

Jay Van Bavel: My name is Jay Van Bavel. I’m a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, and I run the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. One of the main themes of the research that I do, I’ve been doing for the last decade, is the role of technology, especially social media, in society and how it fosters conflict or cooperation between individuals all the way up to societies and between countries.

Thompson: Tell me about this consensus project. Jonathan Haidt called it the largest-ever expert survey. I wasn’t entirely sure if he was talking about literally all expert surveys in the history of mankind or maybe largest-ever expert survey in modern psychology. Maybe you can unpack some of that language. But what’s the motivation for this thing, and how did it come together?

Van Bavel: It’s an interesting story. My colleague, who’s the lead author in the paper, Valerio Capraro, I’ve published a couple other papers with him, including on technology and AI, and we were both invited to write papers for this special issue on the impact and harms of social media. He emailed me and asked me if we wanted to team up and write it together. Initially, he suggested maybe we could get a panel of leading experts and make it a consensus of what we all believe.

When he initially suggested it, he had actually suggested Jon Haidt join us because he has the no. 1 bestselling book in the country on the harms of social media. I responded in my very first email to him saying, “Jon also has a number of prominent critics in the literature, so if you’re up for it, it might be worth bringing on some of those critics and seeing if we can find what the consensus is between a really diverse group of experts who’ve been studying and thinking about this topic.” Although I warned him, I said, “This is going to be really stressful.” So I said, “It’s up to you if you want to take the lead on this.”

Thompson: Well, keep going. There are 229 experts here. Was it just like the longest cc email from the get-go, or how did you find a way to bring in the right kind of experts to answer these questions? I assume that there was some filter process, like it was psychologists and maybe sociologists, but it wasn’t like, “Hey, if you’re an astrophysicist and you have my email and you’re a concerned parent, you can vote on the mental health of adolescents in the Nordics.”

There must have been a curation process here. Without boring people, because we’re going to get to the meat of this in just a second, what’s the methodology? How do you find an expert cohort of more than 200 people to vote on dozens of claims about the effect of smartphones on mental health?

Van Bavel: That’s a great question, and it’s one of the challenges of the paper. We originally started by building a small group to just figure out: What were the claims that we were going to start with? We decided to start with the claims from Jon’s book, and we invited a number of people from various perspectives on this topic, including critics of Jon, to be part of that curation of: What were the key claims in this literature?

We added claims that weren’t from Jon’s book but were additional claims we were thinking about. Then the people that were this core group that had built this set of claims, then we started posting on Listservs and reaching out to our colleagues who we knew to be experts in the field, inviting them to participate in this survey. Basically, what we said is that “You can be an author in this paper if you do this.”

I will say that this is different than other surveys because not only did we get this huge list of experts together and ask them what they thought about all these claims, but then we went through a really rigorous and painstaking process of going back and forth and reviewing all the papers in the literature to figure out: Could we get over 90 percent consensus or better on every single claim? In many of the claims, we had to adjust it and adapt it to make a bigger umbrella about what people could get behind.

Listen to the episode here,

Did you like this podcast summary?

Until now, we have limited this newsletter to one post a month, where we summarize one of our papers and provide a long list of updates about new projects/papers, lab members, job opportunities, and media coverage. But we noticed that almost no one is clicking on the links below the top story.

Therefore, we are thinking about having more frequent posts (perhaps weekly) where we very briefly summarize a new paper or media coverage of our work (e.g., a podcast). We would still plan to keep the monthly summary newsletter. Let us know if you like this plan (feel free to share any other suggestions in the comments):

In case you missed our last newsletter:

After bringing together the experts and painstakingly sorting through the comments and critiques, we were excited to share our preprint of the project, entitled A Consensus Statement on Potential Negative Impacts of Smartphone and Social Media Use on Adolescent Mental Health. Our paper described how we pulled a broad panel of experts to evaluate the state of the scientific evidence regarding the impact of this technology.

To our surprise, our paper sparked a ton of discussion on social media. While many discussions have been constructive with people debating the results and the methods of our study, there has also been a great deal confusion and even misinformation about the paper. Therefore, we decided to explain the findings and give people a rare look behind the scenes about how we launched and conducted this project, including who we invited to our panel and the initial conversation that launched the project.

The findings from the study

As we wrote in our abstract: The impact of smartphones and social media use on adolescent mental health remains widely debated. To clarify expert opinion, we convened over 120 international researchers from 11 disciplines, representing a broad range of views. Using a Delphi method, the panel evaluated 26 claims covering international trends in adolescent mental health, causal links to smartphones and social media, and policy recommendations. The experts suggested 1,400 references and produced a consensus statement for each claim.

The Delphi method is a structured communication technique used to gather and synthesize expert opinions on complex issues, typically through multiple rounds of questionnaires. It aims to reach a consensus or identify areas of agreement and disagreement among experts without face-to-face interactions, fostering independent thought and reducing social pressures. It was originally used in the 1960s to assess trends in science and technology development.

After several rounds of discussion with our large panel of experts, we slowly revised a series of statements about smartphones and social media. We then put these statements to the test by polling our experts. Our paper reveals the initial beliefs of a large panel of experts and then, through the process of discussion, how these statements became more nuanced and achieved higher consensus. Overall, the results of this deliberative process and the set of concrete recommendations provided can help guide future research and evidence-informed policy on adolescent technology use.

If you want to see the discussion among the experts, we included over 170 pages of supplemental material in our preprint plus another 120 pages of partial consensus statements in the OSF page, describing all the steps of the discussion and listing the citations the experts shared as we slowly worked towards a consensus. Alas, the word limit for our article submission did not allow us to include all these details in the body of the paper but we decided to share them in the supplement and on OSF to maximize transparency.

Constructive Criticisms

As we noted above, we received many thoughtful comments and criticisms. Some critics on social media have questioned whether our Expert Panel represented the various viewpoints on the topic. We agree that these are legitimate questions. To help answer these questions, we thought it might be helpful to take you behind the scenes to explain how the project began, the steps we took to balance voices, what worked, what didn’t, and how we attempted to reach a consensus. We tried to convey this to journalists, but it never made it into their columns. Therefore, we decided to share it ourselves.

Before we begin, we also want to note that our paper was a preprint and has not undergone peer review. This makes it an excellent opportunity to make improvements, and we will continue to revise the paper and share an updated version once we receive (and address) comments from reviewers. We appreciate the people who have read our paper, engaged with the content, and offered constructive criticism. Thank you. We are saving the best suggestions and plan to incorporate many of them when we revise the paper. This will no doubt improve the paper, just like any review process. And please email us if you have any further suggestions.

Finally, if you are an expert on the topic who would like to complete our consensus survey please complete this form. We are planning to expand our pool of experts and include folks who missed out in the first round.

Now back to the very beginning…

The origins of the project

Our project began on August 13, 2024, after we each received invitations to contribute to a special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences on public health and digital technologies since we both conduct research broadly in this area. Over email threads with Laura Globig and Steve Rathje, the idea first emerged: why not convene a broad panel of experts to map expert opinion on the potential negative impacts of digital media use on adolescent mental health, and try to reach a consensus about what we know and what we don’t know? This is what we call Stage 1 of the process in the paper: the conception of the idea.

At this stage, we began with the goal to include a diversity of perspectives—especially critics. Valerio came up with the initial idea in an email to Jay where he wrote “since the journal also accepts reviews and perspectives, I'm thinking about putting together a small team to write a short review or perspective piece on the impact of social media on mental health.” He suggested adding other authors currently writing about the topic, including Jonathan Haidt.

Jay responded a few hours later, writing “This sounds interesting to me. I was invited too but the focus on health is something we only do peripherally so joining a team for this makes sense. I've looped in my postdocs Laura Globig (who is interested) and Steve Rathje (who may also be interested as he is doing work in this area). Obviously Jon Haidt would be a good fit, and he also has a handful of critics who might be worth inviting to try and build a consensus statement. Of course, that could also be stressful. So I'll defer to you.”

Steve jumped in an hour later, expressing his interest in the topic and noting that he had recently published a paper that surveyed experts' beliefs on misinformation. He said “It could be interesting to get perspectives from Jon Haidt believers and his critics (e.g., Amy Orben's team) on some of these issues. From there, we started brainstorming names of experts from competing perspectives we wanted to invite, starting with Candice Odgers, Andrew Przybylski, Stuart Ritchie, and Jean Twenge. Valerio took the initiative and started inviting experts (more details later).

Meanwhile, we started brainstorming the claims to be evaluated, based on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, since it contained many ideas that were at the center of the academic and public debate. Valerio organized all the ideas into a first list of central claims, which is still available at this link. This methodological process is what we call Stage 2 of the Delphi process.

At no point in this chain did any of us express our beliefs about any of these claims. In fact, as funny as it sounds, the two of us have never discussed our personal views and we don’t know exactly what each of us believe about these claims. From our initial emails through the final survey, we tried to ensure that we obtained a broad set of experts, consistently and explicitly noting our desire to include critics. For complete transparency, we are happy to show our email exchange to anyone who wants to read it.

At this point, we moved to Stage 3 aimed at developing the precise claims to be tested.

The Claim Development Team

On August 19, Valerio reached out to five leading voices who represented a broad spectrum of positions on the public debate about smartphones/social media and health:

• Jonathan Haidt and his chief researcher Zach Rausch, so the claims would accurately reflect Haidt’s core arguments.

• Two of his strongest public critics, Candice Odgers and Amy Orben, who have published prominent papers on the topic.

• Generational trends scholar Jean Twenge, whose views are broadly aligned with Haidt’s and regularly writes about this issue.

Our aim was to include a fair representation of the range of views from the most prominent voices. All five experts were informed that our source of claims was Haidt’s book, but we did not disclose the full invitee list, to make sure their feedback was focused purely on the scholarly content. Moreover, at this stage we did not mention any specific claim to be evaluated. We simply invited them to join “a team to write a consensus statement on the causal impact of social media on mental health”, specifying that as “part of our methodology, we plan to select the central claims from The Anxious Generation and conduct a survey among experts to evaluate the extent of experimental evidence supporting each claim and identify key areas for future research.”

By the end of the day, Haidt and Rausch agreed to join; Orben declined, and Odgers had not replied. The next morning (August 20), to rebalance the viewpoints, we invited another well-known critic of Haidt, Andrew Przybylski, disclosing that Haidt and Rausch were already on board for transparency.

Two days later (August 22), while we were still waiting from responses from Odgers, Przybylski, and Twenge, we decided to further expand the group, including scholars with varying perspectives and career stages, and we extended invitations to Sakshi Ghai, Patricia Greenfield, Jeff Hancock, Ethan Kross, Sonia Livingstone, and Jay Olson. All but Ghai replied, and they all accepted.

In early September, a round of reminders was sent to Ghai, Odgers, Przybylski, and Twenge. Only Twenge confirmed; Odgers and Przybylski declined, and Ghai remained silent.

Therefore, our “proto–Claim Development Team,” included: Capraro, Van Bavel, Globig, Rathje, Haidt, Rausch, Greenfield, Hancock, Kross, Livingstone, Olson, Twenge, Wormley (involved by Kross), and Yuson Lee (involved by Hancock).

In the weeks that followed, Valerio, working with the Core Group (Valerio, Laura, Steve, Jay) and with direct feedback from Haidt and Rausch, translated the book’s arguments into a first list of 24 potential claims for our list of experts to evaluate. For the evaluation of the claims, Valerio proposed to the Core Group to use the THEARI method that he and Jay had already used in a previous paper to evaluate a number of scientific claims about behavioral science related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This method was developed by Kai Ruggeri, a Public Health Professor, to classify and evaluate scientific evidence relevant to public policy. Valerio’s proposal was accepted.

Valerio prepared a first draft of the survey and circulated it to the wider proto-Claim Development Team, clarifying that the survey was not active: “At this stage, we are gathering feedback for additional improvements. Feel free to provide any comments on any part of the survey.”

Ethan Kross, Jay Olson, Alexandra Wormley, and Jean Twenge provided feedback on several parts of the survey, including the claims themselves, the questions to be asked, and the response options, while Jeff Hancock, Patricia Greenfield, and Sonia Livingstone did not respond. After receiving a reminder, Livingstone formally withdrew, simply saying “On reflection, I will not be participating”, while Hancock and Greenfield never replied. These shifts left us with ten members in the Claim Development Team: Capraro, Van Bavel, Globig, Rathje, Haidt, Rausch, Kross, Olson, Twenge, and Wormley.

Reflecting on this phase, we recognize that critics of The Anxious Generation became underrepresented, despite our deliberate efforts to include them. Attrition is a common feature of large collaborations: participants leave for many reasons, often unrelated to the work itself. Every invitee knew from the outset that our claims would be drawn from Haidt’s book, so we anticipated discussions about which claims to include and how to phrase them, not whether to base the work on this source. Indeed, there were many such discussions, and the final 26 claims were the point of convergence following an extensive deliberation.

Given that the central focus of our project was not the initial claims per se, but the discussion on each claim with an aim to reach a consensus (on at least some claims) we sought to have critics discuss and evaluate these claims. Specifically, we planned to include a large and diverse Expert Panel to engage in the critical step of evaluating the claims.

The core of the Delphi process lies in its iterative surveys and in the diversity of the Expert Panel. Through a series of surveys, the Expert Panel is involved in structured discussions of the scientific evidence regarding the various claims, aimed at delineating the largest common ground where most people can agree. With this in mind, we dedicated vastly more effort to assemble a diverse panel for the four surveys of the Delphi process and integrating the input from these experts until we could identify where people had a consensus (or where they did not).

The Expert Panel

To build a diverse panel, we combined several strategies: we re‑invited anyone from the previous stage who might yet wish to weigh in, we invited prominent critics such as Chris Ferguson, we created a list of experts in several fields, with various perspectives on the topic, and in different career stages, and we advertised our survey on targeted academic forums. Early respondents to the first survey were also invited to recommend peers, leading to further invitations.

There was misinformation shared on social media that the experts were selected by Jon Haidt. This is false: the overwhelming majority of experts had no contact or relationship with Haidt. They either responded to our surveys or were invited by other experts.

In total, 288 experts received invitations to participate in at least one of our four Delphi surveys. For complete transparency, the full list of experts included in this list is available using this link. Experts represent 11 different disciplines, including psychology (30%), communication and media (11%), health sciences (11%), business and management (11%), economics (8%), social sciences (7%), and psychiatry (4%).

Does the set of experts who responded to our surveys represent the various viewpoints about the debate?

It is now important to make a somewhat technical observation. From a statistical perspective, a sample is representative of a target population with respect to some variables, if those variables are proportionally represented in the sample as they are in the broader target population. In our case, the key variable is “viewpoint on the debate” and the target population are the “experts on the topic”.

To statistically test the representativeness of the Expert Panel we needed to know whether the various viewpoints of the Expert Panel proportionally corresponded to the various viewpoints of all the experts. However, this is impossible to check because ours is the first attempt to map expert opinions on this topic. So, nobody knows how these viewpoints are distributed and therefore, there is no benchmark distribution against which to compare representativeness.

Instead of testing for statistical representativeness, what we could do was test for a diversity of viewpoints. This corresponds to asking this question: are there any relevant viewpoints that are missing?

In our paper’s Expert Panel section, we laid out three converging lines of evidence suggesting that the answer is “no”:

1) First, at the outset of Survey 1, we asked participants to rate the overall impact of smartphones and social media on adolescent mental health. Responses spanned the entire continuum, from strongly negative through moderately negative, neutral, and moderately positive to strongly positive, with two‑thirds of experts emphasizing that effects depend on context and moderating factors. In short, we had a highly diverse list of experts with very nuanced views.

2) Second, we measured pre-consensus veracity judgments for each of the 26 claims. On 25 of those claims, experts’ responses included both “probably true” and “probably false”; only the claim linking chronic sleep deprivation to mental health decline was unanimous. This reveals diversity in our panel of experts, even at the granular level of the claims.

3) Third, during Surveys 2–4, panelists rated proposed consensus statements on a one-to-five accuracy scale. The lowest scores averaged around 1.4 while the highest reached a perfect 5.0, proof that both critiques and endorsements informed our Delphi process. In total, 250 critical comments from 60 named experts and 5 anonymous experts were addressed. In the OSF page of the article, we transparently reported all the stages of the process, including the critical comments, our responses, and proposed changes or rebuttals. We invite readers to see for themselves that no critical comment was ignored.

By the end of Survey 4, these indicators painted a clear picture: alarmist and skeptical voices alike shaped every iteration of our Delphi process, no substantive viewpoint was excluded. We created the broadest tent possible, incorporating or responding to all critiques from our team of experts.

Of course, to have a viewpoint represented is different from having that viewpoint proportionally represented. This is why, in the paper, we highlight that the quantitative results should be taken with caution. However, the consensus statements are far more robust to this potential issue, because of their qualitative nature: it is enough that a viewpoint was voiced by one person to be represented, and the Delphi process is designed to respond to minority perspectives when building consensus.

Other criticisms and revisions.

Objections have largely centered on who was at the table rather than what emerged from it. Even if our invitees had skewed one way or the other, that imbalance would only matter if it generated flawed judgments. Ultimately, the central question is whether any substantive errors exist in our 26 consensus statements. If any expert uncovers a genuine error or oversight, we stand ready to make any necessary corrections during the review process.

Our goal has always been to anchor the consensus firmly in empirical evidence and to create a process where divergent perspectives can converge without sacrificing accuracy. For this reason, we remain open to improving our paper if people observe any factual mistake, conceptual oversight, or misinterpretation of evidence in any of our 26 statements. Please email us if you spot any specific issues.

Challenges about Communicating Consensus

Reading the debate on social media, it seems that another source of confusion stemmed from the fact that the only figures in the paper referred to experts’ pre-consensus opinions about the claims, rather than the finalized consensus statements. As noted above, this was useful to reveal the range of perspectives among our experts. This ranged from initial consensus on some claims (e.g., sleep deprivation can reduce mental health), to a lack of consensus on other claims (e.g., decline in Nordic mental health). It also revealed a great deal of nuance with many experts noting they “don’t know” about several claims. These figures report “snap expert opinions” about stronger claims.

The finalized statements—summarized in Table 2—reflect the results from the Delphi process. These reveal a nuanced view among the experts that incorporated 250 critical comments. This table shows the finalized claim that emerged through discussion, the final consensus rating, and key evidence relevant to the claim. It also includes potential future research directions since our consensus statements do not reflect the final word on any of these claims and should inspire more research.

One inherent challenge here is that the output of a Delphi process is primarily verbal and qualitative, making it difficult to represent accurately through a figure. This is largely why we relied on a table to summarize the consensus results. The figure simply presents numerical indicators collected before the consensus process. We explicitly made this clear in the paper—the section is titled “Experts’ pre-consensus beliefs and awareness of the evidence” [emphasis added].

Many readers on social media appear confused as these details were in the paper. This distinction may not have been salient enough to people who did not read the paper and thought that the conclusions of the consensus statements were bolder. Given this confusion, we will try to communicate this more clearly during the revision phase, such as including more detailed figure captions, and including those captions in social media posts.

Another challenge we faces is writing a paper with over 100 authors. Not everyone agrees with every editorial decision (e.g., which findings to include in the paper vs. the supplement or how to summarize the findings in the abstract). For instance, some coauthors wanted us to make stronger conclusions in our paper and others wanted weaker conclusions. This led to challenge as we sought to strike a balance between the various editorial suggestions we received, while retaining accuracy and communicating the key findings succinctly.

This is an impossible problem since we will never get complete agreement among every single author, especially when we intentionally invited people from such a diverse group of experts. One of our colleagues refers to this as the “Too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Indeed, we lost potential authors from both sides of the debate for failing to fully comply with their desired framing. However, nearly all our collaborators were happy enough with the paper that they agreed to sign their name to the paper.

As such, our paper represents a compromise between many competing perspectives and a best *first* attempt at an honest representation of the methods and findings. But we will continue to edit the paper through the review process and hope the final published paper will be an even better approximation.

Despite these natural disagreements, our hope is that the consensus statements will better reflect the perspectives of our experts given the rigorous process we undertook to surface them. However, we are already brainstorming about how to include an even greater pool of experts and expand our project (perhaps as part of this paper or a future paper).

Avoiding a false equivalence

In most hot button debates, the people driving the public discourse—especially on social media—are often those with the strongest opinions. And people with more nuanced views often stay on the sidelines. This can lead to a funhouse mirror version of reality on social media, where people appear highly polarized despite a broad consensus on important issues.

Unfortunately, this can even produce a false equivalence—where it seems like an issue is evenly divided. This regularly happens in political coverage and science debates, when journalists select people from both sides for debates. Our hope is that a consensus statement can serve as a common starting point for public discussions. There appear to be many issues where people agree, and the consensus is quite nuanced.

Of course, it’s possible for the literature—and therefore consensus—to evolve. As more research emerges, we hope that areas of ambiguity will diminish, and the consensus will increase. In the near term, we think our paper can serve as a useful guide for topics where research is urgently needed. Rather than an end point for research, we believe this offers a roadmap. Specifically, far more research is needed on the causal impacts of social media and potential policy solutions that reduce social media access.

This post was written by Valerio Capraro & Jay Van Bavel, with edits from Laura Globig and Steve Rathje

In the News

Jay and former lab member Clara Pretus wrote an op-ed on their neuroscience research regarding what happens in the brain when people use different lenses to make decisions, including moral, hedonic, and pragmatic . You can read the op-ed here.

New Papers & Preprints

We have a new preprint out on the accuracy of expert predictions - specifically in the domain of climate change. Expert forecasting is increasingly used to anticipate the success of behavioral interventions. However, little is known about how accurate expert predictions are—particularly in the climate domain. In this pre-registered study, we asked academics, government officials, climate change communicators, and the general public to predict the effectiveness of 11 climate interventions on belief, policy support, and effortful sustainable behavior. We found that academics generally outperform the public, but how well they do varies. Unfortunatley, they do not outperform predictions based on simple heuristics. You can read more here. This paper was led by former lab member Kimberly C. Doell, along with Lukas Lengersdorff, Shawn A Rhoads, Boryana Todorova, Jonas P. Nitschke, James Druckman, Madalina Vlasceanu, Claus Lamm, and Jay.

Announcements

Our Master’s student Nadya Hanaveriesa won a Graduate Student Research Award to support her thesis research! Congratulations to Nadya!

We also want to extend our heartfelt congratulations to our former lab manager Yifei Pei who will be completing a Master’s of Education at Harvard this fall before entering Penn State’s cognitive psychology PhD program in Fall 2026.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s it for this month, folks - thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month!

Alas, our brains occasionally mistake something harmless for a real threat. This is what scientists call a “proxy failure.” A “proxy” here means a stand-in—our brain uses negative or dangerous stimuli as a signal to draw our attention to something that might be important or dangerous, even when it’s not.

Our latest paper explains why this poses a problem on social media, which is built to show us things that grab our attention. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok use engagement based algorithms that are designed to keep us online as long as possible. These algorithms assume that if content receives a lot of likes, clicks, or comments, it must be people want to see.

But because our brains naturally pay more attention to threats or negative content, the algorithms that decide what we see end up promoting more of that kind of content—outrage, division, and fear. It also incentivizes social media users and content creators to “hack” our brain’s attention system by producing negative and attention grabbing content.

Importantly, most people don’t actually want this kind of content in their feeds. Research from our lab finds that while people realize that false, angry, or hateful content tends to go viral, they’d prefer to see posts that are true, positive, or informative (see figure below). The problem is that social media platforms rely on engagement—how much time we spend looking at something or interacting with it—as a shortcut for what we like. But this shortcut (another kind of proxy) doesn’t always reflect what we truly value, promoting false, negative or hostile content.

There’s some good news: small changes to how social media works can make a big difference. For example, when platforms change the incentives and reward people for posting accurate information, users are much more likely to share true information. Members of our lab have found that Even adding simple buttons like “trust”, “distrust”, or “a misleading button” can help people think more critically about what they see and make better choices about what to share.

Right now, many algorithms focus on “watch time” or how long people look at a post. Because negativity drives online information consumption, this system ends up spreading more harmful content. But if platforms gave people better tools to control their own feeds—like being able to easily say “I don’t want to see posts like this”—then users could shape their experience more intentionally, and reduce their exposure to unwanted threatening stimuli on social media.

Some of these tools already exist, but they’re hard to find or buried in settings menus. If platforms made these tools easier to use and more visible, it could help reduce exposure to harmful or upsetting content. Our research suggests that changing the incentives on social media platforms could help align them with the preferences of users and help slow the flood of hostile and negative content.

In the end, whether these changes happen depends on what social media companies care about most. If their main goal is making money, they’ll likely keep using systems that focus on engagement and sensationalism. But if they truly want to improve people’s experiences and support a healthier society, they should prioritize content that helps users feel informed, connected, and safe—even if it means people spend a little less time scrolling.

Citation: Robertson, C. E., del Rosario, K., Rathje, S., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Changing the incentive structure of social media may reduce online proxy failure and proliferation of negativity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47, e81. doi:10.1017/S0140525X23002935

News and Announcements

Congratulations to lab affiliate Kareena del Rosario for receiving the 2025 Stuart Cook Award! Kareena does research at the intersection of emotion and morality and will be defending her PhD later this month before starting her Postdoc. The Stuart Cook Award is given annually to the top PhD student in social psychology, as voted by faculty. Kareena joins several several former lab members who have won the award, include Claire Robertson who won it last year.

Claire Robertson received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Psychology of Technology Network Dissertation Award for her thesis on “Understanding the Causes and Effects of Online Extremity”! The Psychology of Technology Institute hosts an annual dissertation award program for doctoral students around the world to help them gain support and visibility for their work. Congrats to Claire who will be starting a Professor position at Colby College in the fall where she will be leading The Extremism and Polarization Lab!

Speaking of technology, Jay gave a talk this week at NYU Langone Medical School as part of a conference on the health implications of social media. His discussed the potential health risks of disconnecting with real people and replacing it with social media (along with other health risks of social media, like the spread of misinformation). This is an issue that public health experts are taking very seriously and it was great to bring experts from multiple fields together to share insights.

This newsletter was written by Sarah Mughal and edited by Jay Van Bavel.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

The Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU

The role of social identity in spreading moral outrage online

If you have spent time on social media, you have likely noticed that posts expressing moral outrage or strong emotions often go viral. Our lab has found that the more moral-emotional words a message contains, the more likely it is to be shared. This pattern—known as moral contagion—captures how moral-emotional language increases the spread of moralized …

Read more

a year ago · 16 likes · Center for Conflict + Coop.

That’s it for this month, folks - thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month!

But why?

Research led by our lab alumnus Billy Brady has found that receiving positive feedback on “morally outraged” posts encourages people to express more moral outrage in the future. In short, people have social incentives to express outrage. These incentives—and norms—can lead people to exaggerate their expressions of outrage leading others to overestimate how morally outraged others actually are. This is all part of the outrage cycle that, in turn, leads others to generate exaggerated perceptions of hostility, ideological extremity, and polarization.

As political conversations move from the kitchen table to social media, we are seeing more intergroup conflict, public shaming, and hate speech. And much of it is facilitated by morally contagious messages. Indeed, we have found that even our feelings of hatred are loaded with a sense of morality—we often hate people or groups who we believe are harming others or violating our moral values.

Worse yet, moral-emotional rhetoric online is linked to the spread of misinformation, hostility, and the formation of echo chambers. Moralized communication online can also translate into real-world violence and is frequently exploited by bad actors to mobilize support for anti-democratic causes.

Despite this, we still know relatively little about why and how moral-emotional content amplifies engagement and conflict online. In a brand new paper from our lab that was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we are finally able to address this gap. In a series of five pre-registered experiments with nearly 2,500 participants, we identified causal pathways through which moral-emotional language influences social media sharing and its implications for intergroup relations. Here are our key lessons:

Moral-emotional rhetoric increases sharing of political content online: Participants were more inclined to share messages critical of political opponents when those messages used moral-emotional language rather than neutral language. Even changing a single word caused people to share the message. This effect was particularly strong among participants who highly identified with their political party.

The influence of moral-emotional rhetoric on sharing depends on social identity: The more people identified with their political party, the more likely they were to share moral-emotional messages online. People who identified most strongly with their party shared moral-emotional messages approximately 80% of the time, likely because using emotional language allows these individuals to signal their belonging and alignment with their party.

Using moral-emotional language shapes how others see us: People who shared moral-emotional messages were perceived as strongly identified with their ingroup but they were also seen as less open-minded and less worthy of a political conversation by outgroup members. In short, people see you as a close-minded partisan when you use this type of language.

Expressing moral-emotional language online is a double-edged sword: On one hand, it boosts the reach of our messages and strengthens ingroup bonds, satisfying essential social needs like belonging. This makes moral emotions a powerful tool that unites group members online. On the other hand, it undermines intergroup dialogue, making productive communication and cooperation across ideological lines difficult. The widespread use of moral outrage language creates the impression of deeply divided social networks filled with intense hostility—even if many people don’t genuinely feel as extreme as their posts suggest.

Summary: In the context of contentious political conversations online, moral-emotional language causes political partisans to share content more frequently, especially among highly identified partisans. This is an important finding since all the prior work on moral contagion relied on correlational datasets. Now we know that this type of language has a direct causal impact.

Expressing negative moral-emotional language in social media messages makes the message author appear more strongly identified with their group but also leads outgroup members to see the author as less open-minded and less worthy of conversation. As such, this type of rhetoric might help make a message go viral but at the cost of deepening intergroup division.

Citation: *Brady, W. J. & Van Bavel, J. J. (2025). Social identity shapes antecedents and functional outcomes of moral emotion expression in online networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Read the preprint here.

News and Announcements

Our lab manager Sarah Mughal has been accepted as an incoming PhD student in the Psychology Department at Rutgers University! Congrats to Sarah on reaching the next step of her academic career—we wish her the very best!

As a result, we are hiring a new lab manager! You can view the job posting at the link below: https://apply.interfolio.com/166620 Applications will be accepted starting April 18th, and will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please spread the word and we hope you’ll come join us at New York University!

Jay was named a 2024 Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS, an independent scholarly analytics platform and research database of over 30 million scholar profiles. High Ranked Scholars are the most productive (number of publications) authors whose works are of profound impact (citations) and of utmost quality (h-index). Jay’s scholarship placed him in the top 0.05% of all scholars globally. Congrats to Jay and all his students and collaborators!

Our postdoc Laura Globig was recently awarded the Dana Foundation Neuroscience & Society Trainee Research Award. This highly-competitive award supports innovative neuroscience research with the potential for large-scale societal impact. Congratulations to Laura!

On May 5th, Jay will be speaking at NYU Langone’s 9th Annual “Health And…” conference, revolving around the impact of social media on health. You can find more information here.

Preprints and Publications

Jay co-authored a Correspondence article in Nature this week with Jonas De Keersmaecker, emphasizing the need for scientists to regain trust in increasingly polarized times. You can read the full correspondence article here.

The preprint of our methods paper on the measurement of intellectual humility is out. We consolidated existing popular scales into the Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility scale (CIIH) which offers strong psychometric properties and greater utility than existing measures. You can read the preprent here. This work was led by former lab alum Philip Pärnamets, along with Jay and Mark Alfano.

This newsletter was written by Sarah Mughal and edited by Anni Sternisko and Jay Van Bavel.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s it for this month, folks - thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month!

For years, climate advocates, journalists, and policymakers have wrestled with which words best capture the seriousness of our overheating planet. Should we say “climate change,” or opt for heavier phrases like “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” or even “global boiling”? Like Luntz, many have argued that these linguistic nuances might lead to greater public concern, shifting more people from apathy to action. But according to our recent global study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the choice of terminology itself appears to have no measurable impact on people’s willingness to engage in climate action.

Led by Danielle Goldwert, the papaer analyzed data from 63 countries. Despite differences in cultural background, political ideology, and demographic factors, our data suggest one main conclusion: swapping out one climate term for another does not meaningfully change people’s stated commitment to fight climate change.

The Power of Words?

Efforts to strategically shape public perception through language are nothing new. Historically, there has been a strong belief, known broadly as the theory of linguistic relativity, that specific words we choose can shape our beliefs and even behaviors. If language can alter how we think about space and color, proponents argued, it might also shift how we perceive the rising temperatures and intensifying storms of a warming planet.

Yet scientific findings on this front have been mixed. Some studies noted that people perceived “global warming” as more alarming than “climate change.” Others found no meaningful difference. Given these conflicting results, we took a broad look at whether updating climate terminology could lead to more commitment to climate solutions.

Experiment 1: A Global Perspective

Our first experiment involved 4,531 participants across 63 countries. We tested nine common climate terms: “climate change,” “global warming,” “global heating,” “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” “carbon pollution,” “carbon emissions,” “greenhouse gasses,” and “greenhouse effect.”

In a randomized design, each participant saw just one of these terms when asked about their willingness to take action: “To what degree are you willing to act to prevent [insert term here]?” Answers were collected on a 0 to 100 scale, where 0 meant “not at all” and 100 meant “very much so.”

Overall, the global sample reported high willingness to engage in climate action (on average, 74%). Despite this high baseline, there was no difference in motivation across the nine terms. Whether people read “climate crisis,” “global warming,” or “carbon emissions,” their responses about willingness to act barely moved. Bayesian statistical tests strongly supported this null result.

We further explored whether factors like political ideology, socioeconomic status, or gender would change how people responded to different terms. Again, nothing made a difference. For example, the terms resonated similarly among conservatives and liberals. This was surprising given previous findings suggesting that conservatives might dismiss “global warming” in favor of the more neutral “climate change.” Our larger, updated global dataset failed to replicate that pattern.

Experiment 2: A U.S. Replication

We then replicated our approach with 1,601 participants in the United States. This time, we added a tenth and more sensational term: “global boiling.” Yet again, the results were clear: no matter which of the 10 terms participants saw, their reported willingness to engage in climate action remained constant. Roughly 57% of the U.S. sample indicated willingness to take climate action, but none of the terminology increased (or decreased) that figure. Even “global boiling,” arguably the most urgent-sounding phrase, didn’t move the needle.

Key Takeaways

1. Across tens of thousands of participants in two large-scale experiments, labeling climate change in different ways had no effect on their stated willingness to act.

2. People, on average, are already quite concerned about climate change. The persistent threat we see in our daily weather, news coverage, and local experiences might overshadow subtle differences in wording.

3. Our global data showed similar null results across the political spectrum, challenging previous assumptions that conservatives react differently to “global warming” than “climate change.”

4. Resources spent debating the best phrase might be better used to drive tangible action. Messages that offer concrete steps or highlight success stories are more likely to inspire real change.

So What Does Matter?

Our findings don’t suggest that language has no role to play – after all, clear communication is vital for public understanding. But when it comes to prompting real behavioral change, the subtle difference between saying “climate change” vs. “climate crisis” vs. “global boiling” appears, at least for now, inconsequential.

This raises the question of where we should focus our efforts instead. We’d argue that calls to action might be more successful when they highlight:

• Concrete, achievable steps for individuals and communities, such as carpooling, installing energy-efficient appliances, or organizing local tree-planting events.

• Impactful solutions that people can connect to their daily lives, from rooftop solar to collective efforts to pass pro-climate legislation.

• Visible role models (neighbors, local businesses, well-known figures) who are doing these things successfully, making change feel tangible and inspiring.

• Community-building messages that emphasize shared values, mutual responsibility, and collective impact, reassuring people they’re not alone in their concerns or their actions.

By focusing on substantive strategies and actionable guidance, rather than the flashiest new phrase, climate communicators may see greater success mobilizing the public. In other words, it’s not about what we call it, but likely how we encourage people to tackle it.

Looking Ahead

This study doesn’t close the book on the relationship between language and climate action. Future research might explore repeated exposures to different terms over time, or whether new, more dramatic language shapes coverage and activism in subtle ways that aren’t captured in a single survey. But, our evidence strongly suggests that changing labels alone won’t galvanize the public to address climate change.

This also makes us wonder whether the obsessive debates over language that often dominate activist communities are really that meaningful. Perhaps their energy would be better spent taking action rather than debating—or policing—subtle differences in terminology. Before we join the bandwagon and re-label something it would be good practice to first see if the new label moves the needle.

For media outlets, advocacy organizations, and policymakers, these findings provide a valuable note of caution. Language certainly matters for clarity, accuracy, and credibility. However, if the end goal is to motivate action, then doubling down on how to act, rather than what to call it, may be the more productive path forward.

Reference
Goldwert, D., Doell, K. C., Van Bavel, J. J., & Vlasceanu, M. (2024). Climate change terminology does not influence willingness to take climate action. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102482. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102482

News and Announcements

Jay will be giving a talk at the Learning and the Brain conference on April 25th in NYC; come check it out if you are in the city!

Steve Rathje, a postdoc in our lab, was a runner up for “Best Flash Talk” at the Society for Affective Science conference, out of 70 other talks given. Congrats to Steve!

This newsletter was written by Danielle Goldwert and edited by Anni Sternisko and Jay Van Bavel.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s it for this month, folks - thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month!

These text data contain valuable information about people’s personality traits, emotions, social group membership, among other psychological variables. Natural Language Processing (NLP), enables psychologists and other scientists to analyze massive amounts of text to uncover these psychological patterns, and study human interactions at a scale never before possible.

In a review published in Nature Reviews Psychology, we lay out how NLP can be used to study human psychology and behavior, describing methods, trade-offs, and processing pipelines. For this newsletter, we summarize the ways NLP is used in psychological science, important considerations when using such methods, and our recommendations for best practices.

Applications of NLP in Behavioral Science

There are three main ways that psychologists and behavioral scientists use NLP for text analysis:

1. Exploratory Content Analysis

Exploratory content analysis uses NLP to identify patterns, themes, or insights from large text datasets without an a-priori hypothesis. Examples include identifying common topics in social media discussions, tracking shifts in public sentiments over time (such as changes in attitudes toward climate change), and uncovering discourse patterns, such as how political rhetoric evolves during election campaigns. For these analyses, it’s important to distinguish between words and concepts: words are symbols that can represent concepts, while concepts are collective understandings that are shaped by their use in society. Researchers must keep in mind that the meaning of a word can be context-dependent and may change over time. In other words, the literal meaning of a word sometimes differs from its implied meaning in context.

2. Annotating Text by Psychological Constructs

A critical goal in analyzing text data is identifying psychological constructs. For example, researchers might analyze text to determine its emotional sentiment, assess a person’s personality traits based on their language use, or detect signs of depression and anxiety in social media posts. Different approaches have different tradeoffs. For example, the key-word based approach involves counting the frequency of keywords such as “angry” and “sad”. While it is a reliable and easily interpretable method, it often fails to capture the context or semantics of the text. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLM) use machine learning methods to process and generate text. They are highly efficient and more accurate because they consider both context and semantics. However, they are often considered “black boxes”, making it difficult to interpret how they arrive at their decision.

3. Relating Psychological Constructs to Behavioral Outcomes

NLP-generated insights are often integrated into statistical models to study how language relates to behavior. Examples include analyzing how moral-emotional language in social media posts influences engagement (e.g., posts expressing anger or outrage tend to receive more shares), whether certain linguistic features are linked to specific mental health states, and how political rhetoric correlates with changes in public opinion.

Beyond explanation, NLP is also used for prediction. For instance, researchers can develop machine learning models to forecast mental health crises based on people’s online language use, to assess the risk of violent behavior by analyzing radicalized rhetoric, and to predict the effectiveness of persuasive messaging in marketing and public health campaigns. Evidently, these predictive models have important real-world applications, such as serving as an early warning system for harmful online behavior. However, they come with ethical concerns—such as the risk of misinterpreting signals and privacy violations—must be carefully addressed by researchers.

All NLP methods have their strengths and limitations. Researchers should therefore not overly rely on or interpret any single method. Common best practice is to combine multiple methods–using simple interpretable approaches alongside advanced models–to enhance the robustness of their results. Transparency and reproducibility are equally important. This includes adopting open science practices, clearly defining how psychological constructs are measured, and thoroughly reporting all aspects of the used models. Research using NLP methods should also be firmly grounded in theoretical frameworks, using theory as a benchmark to validate findings.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Despite the proliferation of NLP methods in all areas of psychology, NLP isn’t a magical tool that can be used indiscriminately; it has several limitations.

For example, LLMs and other NLP models inherit biases from their training data, which can lead to reinforcing stereotypes, and misinterpreting certain dialects. To mitigate these biases, researchers leverage bias detection tools and use diverse and representative datasets, but eradicating bias in NLP models entirely remains a challenge. Additionally, proprietary LLMs (like ChatGPT) change frequently and in unclear ways, rendering it difficult to perfectly replicate studies. Open-source models provide more transparency but often lag behind in performance.

The data used for NLP analysis is often sourced from online platforms like social media. However, users may be unaware that their data is being collected and analyzed. When web scraping certain websites or platforms, researchers should check the terms of data usage in user agreements, and remove personally identifiable information when handling sensitive information. Ethical frameworks for how to use online public data are still evolving. It is critical that these frameworks address the potential effects of research as well as the negative effects and how they can be minimized.

However, as NLP approaches continue to evolve, new opportunities arise to mitigate their current limitations. Open-source models are rapidly improving, with recent models like DeepSeek rivaling GPT’s performance at a significantly lower cost. Utilizing diverse data and complementing NLP’s with traditional survey or behavioral methods can further strengthen the robustness of research findings. Our full review offers several actionable recommendations to ensure the success and reproducibility of NLP-based analysis in behavioral science.

To learn more:

Citation: Feuerriegel, S., Maarouf, A., Bär, D., Geissler, D., Schweisthal, J., Pröllochs, N., Robertson, Claire., Rathje, S., Hartmann, J., Mohammad, S., Netzer, O., Siegel, A., Plank, B., & Van Bavel. J. J. (2025). Using natural language processing to analyze text data in behavioral science. Nature Reviews Psychology. www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00392-z

Recent Events

Jay spoke at the University of Texas at Austin on March 7 as part of a conference on what it looks like to engage in healthy democratic debate and discussion.

Outreach

Jay was interviewed for an article in PNAS about whether science-based interventions can help tamp down the rising polarization sweeping the globe. Check out his full quote below! You can read the full article here.

Postdoc Rémi Thériault secured a € 23,500 Francisco J. Varela Research Award grant from Mind & Life Europe for the lab! This will fund Rémi's project, "Reading Books Changes Lives: Investigating the Effects of Popular Psychology Books on the Development of Moral Character and Action".

Rémi will also be presenting at NYU’s Spring 2025 Scholar speaker series; see below for more information and to RSVP! Thursday, March 20th, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Join OGS at our Spring 2025 Scholar Speaker Series, an event we hold each semester to celebrate the work of our international visiting scholars! This is a great opportunity to network, collaborate, and mingle with people from all departments and fields, all while enjoying a light lunch and refreshments! Our two speakers, Dr. Eng. Andrzej Głuchowski and Rémi Thériault, will present their current research all relating to our theme: Strengthening Our Foundations: Altruism & Geotechnics, detailing ways to strengthen the literal and social foundations that make up our daily lives. Please fill out this form to RSVP!

Jay was interviewed for an article in Scientific American, where he discusses our work on how fact-checking is less effective when the issue is politically polarized. Read the full article here.

Lab alum Jesper Rasmussen recently secured a position as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. Congrats, Jesper!

Jesper and colleagues Lasse Lindekilde and Michael Bang Petersen also recently published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Political Science showing that investing in citizens' communication competences through actionable communication from health authorities, can decrease Covid-19 misinformation sharing. Read the full paper here: bit.ly/3UuKZJb

Jay was recently featured in a Lavin agency clip, where he talked about giving to members of our community makes us feel good. Check it out here!

This newsletter was created from a summary of the below article and edited by Sarah Mughal, Anni Sternisko and Jay Van Bavel.

As we close out another semester, the Social Identity and Morality Lab is also coming to an end with a brand new name and look for 2025. We are pleased to announce that, starting in January, we are now known as the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. We will be sharing a number of big announcements about the Center here. In the meantime, enjoy this brief summary of our research from the last year.

January: SOCIAL MEDIA & MORALITY

The attention economy of social media can lead people to create and express exaggerated beliefs and carefully curated content designed to capture attention rather than reflect reality or benefit humanity. In January, we published our review on the connection between social media and morality. How does the online environment shape human psychology? One means by which people and groups can capture attention and drive engagement is by sharing morally and emotionally evocative content. For instance, we have found that people will pay greater attention to moral or emotional words as a result of evolutionary pressures that rewarded the ability to navigate social situations—and this is linked to what we share on social media. If moral outrage is a fire, is the Internet like gasoline, accelerating and exaggerating existing moral dynamics? Our paper describes the psychological function and appeal of morality, and how these instincts are harnessed and monetized online. We also review the impact of moral psychology on a broad array of individual and societal issues related to social media.

February: A GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE INTERVENTION TOURNAMENT

We covered one of our largest mega-studies to date: a global tournament testing different interventions to motivate climate action across the globe. We compared 11 interventions across the same outcome variables in one large experiment, to effectively determine how each one stacks up against the other in a controlled test. Overall, the different interventions had small but significant effects globally. But the impact of the interventions varied widely based on the outcomes that were targeted and different characteristics of the audience. Sadly, no interventions increased effortful behavior towards fighting climate change via the tree planting task (only on the self-report measures). These results reveal that no intervention offers silver bullet solution when it comes to climate change. As such, scholars need to be far more modest in their claims about these messages and practitioners need to be careful about what interventions they want to use to achieve their desired goals.

March: CAREER ADVICE FOR SCIENTISTS

In March, we did a recap of all the columns Jay helped write for Science Magazine’s Letters to Young Scientists. We cover advice for scientists at all stages of their career, from top 10 tips to help you succeed in your PhD application, to how to ace faculty job talks, to essential things to know as you kickstart your own lab. But there are also helpful columns for people who aren’t in science, like how to resolve conflict, write more effectively, or give a great presentation. Check out the full list in the original newsletter! These were originally read by nearly half a million people in Science and now you can see them summarized in one place and sorted by career stage. H

April: A MISINFORMATION INTERVENTION FOR POLARIZED CONTENT

Misinformation is a serious problem on nearly all social media sites. We discussed our paper on a new intervention designed to reduce the spread of misinformation on social media: the misleading count. Specifically, we developed an intervention that works well against polarized content, which is much more resistant to fact checks and accuracy nudges. Specifically, we developed a “Misleading” count added to social media posts showing how many in-group members of a user’s political party marked a social media post as misinformation on each social media post. The number of people who reported they would be likely to share misleading social media posts dropped by 25% in response to the Misleading count showing in-group judgements, compared with 5% in response to an accuracy nudge. These results provide initial evidence that identity-based interventions may be more effective than neutral ones for addressing partisan-based misinformation.

May: OVERCOMING PARTISAN DIVIDES IN CLIMATE CHANGE

A phenomenon known as the “green gap” reflects the disparity between what people believe about climate change and their actual climate actions. In May, we reviewed our paper about the political divide in climate change beliefs and interventions. Our study examined whether the political polarization in climate change beliefs manifests as polarization regarding climate actions, such as investing effort and time to generate tree-planting donations. Overall, most people around the world believe in human caused climate change and support a wide variety of policies to reduce it (exceeding 75% of our total sample). We observe worldwide polarization in climate change beliefs and policy support, with liberals generally showing higher levels of both compared to conservatives. However, this polarization does not extend to the amount of effort and time invested in a climate-relevant task—liberals and conservatives are equally likely to engage in the tree-planting donation task.

June: THE IMPACT OF GENERATIVE AI ON SOCIETY

We summarized our new paper on the five impacts of generative AI on society. In the article, we examine the paradox of GenAI: its potential to exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities while simultaneously unlocking opportunities for shared prosperity. For example, generative AI could increase the spread of misinformation, but also reduce it; decrease inequalities in the workplace, but also increase them; personalize teaching, but also increase the gender gap in education; help clinicians make better choices, but also lead to mistakes; and dictate either equitable policy making or run unchecked with implications for decades to come. It is an exciting, yet daunting moment to be alive, charged with heavy responsibilities. Each of us—whether as researchers, policy makers, or citizens—will play a crucial role as an architect of the future and can contribute to driving the course towards the positive use of what could be one of humanity’s greatest innovation, or its worst.

July: MORALITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Just as the atomic bomb drastically changed modern warfare, the internet has made a profound impact on moral psychology. In July, we discussed our theoretical paper about morality in the modern age. Humans have an innate tendency to care about moral issues like fairness, empathy, and reciprocity, all traits that were evolutionarily adaptive for small, closely knit groups to survive. However, the internet connects over 5 billion people together in a brand new, technological environment that has fundamentally altered our social world. We argue that the moral instincts humans developed in small social networks are poorly suited for this large, interconnected environment due to the scale of the internet and the distance between people on the internet. Understanding the challenges therein is crucial for navigating and shaping the online environment to prevent maladaptive outcomes. While the internet offers many benefits and has been used as a tool for collective organizing and platforming disenfranchised voices, its structure and incentives currently exploit our moral instincts, leading to negative consequences that should be addressed through thoughtful design and regulation.

August: INTERGROUP MORAL HYPOCRISY

We talked about our replication of a famous moral psychology study. Past research has found that we tend to favor members of groups we belong to, and disfavor people who belong to other groups. For example, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno conducted a highly cited experiment where they randomly assigned people to groups, and found that people judged the same immoral act (giving a difficult task to someone else and an easy task to yourself) differently based on who was the perpetrator. Giving someone a harder task was judged to be more fair when the person themselves was the perpetrator (self), or when someone from their group was the perpetrator In a recent paper, we tried to replicate their work and see if their findings still held. To our surprise, the results did not replicate the result of the original study—but they nevertheless led us to believe that group identity does create moral hypocrisy. We found that people did not evaluate themselves and their in-group more fairly compared to the out-group and others. However, people who identified more strongly with their group did judge in-group members more fairly. Thus, we did find evidence of moral hypocrisy among highly identified group members.

September: THE IDENTITY-BASED MODEL OF BELIEF

In September we released an “election edition” of the newsletter, where we talked about our updated model of social identity and belief. The model explains how the push and pull between social identity goals and accuracy goals shapes people’s political beliefs, (biased) information processing, and the spread of (mis)information. According to this model, social identity goals can override accuracy goals, and vice versa. Most people value accuracy much of the time. But when people prioritize social ties and belongingness to their party over accuracy, they align their beliefs with other party members rather than facts. In the context of (mis)information, this means that people might ignore factual information if it threatens their positive partisan identity, emphasizing flattering and validating information instead. In lieu of accuracy concerns, people might believe or share false information simply because it reinforces their positive beliefs about their party, or they want to signal their party loyalty. Motivated cognition cannot fully explain partisan differences in belief. Partisan differences can also arise, for example, because people are exposed to different information sources. Of course, people are also motivated to select different information diets or pay attention to some sources over others. So identity often shapes these inputs.

October: POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND HEALTH

Much research on political polarization focuses on how it affects subsequent politics and party lines. In October, we described the link between political polarization and public health. We have found that political polarization poses significant health risks to individuals and society—by obstructing the implementation of legislation and policies aimed at keeping people healthy, by discouraging individual action to address health needs, such as getting a flu shot, and by boosting the spread of misinformation that can reduce trust in health professionals. As individuals move further from the political center—in either direction—there is a deterioration in individual and public health, such as trust in medical expertise, participation in healthy behaviors, and preventive practices, ranging from healthy diets to vaccination. Polarization affects what health information people are willing to believe and shapes the relevant actions they are willing to take. Political leaders, inside and outside the US, may make public health worse by linking health behavior to partisan identity rather than medical needs or expert advice, thereby undercutting the role of expertise and ignoring approaches grounded in science, often leading to attacks on medical professionals and the healthcare system. However, policy and leadership decisions can mitigate the potential harm from polarization.

November: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CREATES A FUNHOUSE MIRROR

In November, we discussed our review on why social media seems to depict a twisted wonderland version of reality compared to what people experience offline. We argued that social media acts like a funhouse mirror, exaggerating and amplifying certain voices and behaviors while diminishing others. This warping of reality happens because social media platforms are dominated by a small, vocal minority of users who post extreme opinions or content. Algorithms further amplify these extremes, giving people the impression that such views and behaviors are the norm, even when they are not. Solving this problem requires changes at both individual and systemic levels; social media platforms can—and should—prioritize nuanced and accurate content rather than promoting extreme views for engagement. Users need to be more aware of how social media warps their perception of reality. Recognizing that online environments amplify extremes can help mitigate their influence. Finally, more studies are needed to understand how online distortions influence offline behaviors and how to counteract these effects effectively.

December: December’s newsletter is the one you’re reading now! Thank you for coming along with us on our research journey in the past year, and for whatever the future holds for our center.

Other News & Announcements

We have a new paper explaining all the ways you can use natural language processing to analyze text data in Nature Reviews Psychology. We provide user friendly recommendations for using NLP to ensure rigour and reproducibility. Here is a free link to the paper that was co-authored by lab members Claire Robertson, Steve Rathje, and Jay.

Lab postdoc, Steve Rathje, was selected for the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 List!! Steve is a psychology researcher who makes TikTok videos about the intersection of social media and psychology for his more than 1 million followers. He has published 34 peer-reviewed articles in publications like Nature, Science and PNAS and is the winner of the Association for Psychological Science's "Rising Star" Award and others.

In other good news, Steve Rathje won the AXA Research Fund Post-Doctoral Fellowship for his research on “Navigating misinformation and trust erosion in the digital age”!

Lab PhD student Danielle Goldwert won the grand prize for students in APA’s science poster competition, for her poster titled “The Differential Impact of Climate Interventions along the Political Divide in 60 Countries”! It was based on our recent paper in Nature Communications. Congrats to Danielle!

Lab postdoc Laura Globig was interviewed by Bloomberg News regarding her research on genAI, on how women are less likely to use generative AI tools and why. You can read the full article here!

Jay was named to the Ambassador Council of the Alliance for Decision Education, which are helping to build a broad understanding of why decision education in schools can improve individuals and society.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

• Only 3% of social media accounts are toxic, but they produce 33% of the content.

• A mere 0.1% of users are responsible for sharing 80% of fake news.

• 74% of all online conflicts begin in just 1% of online communities.

What you are seeing online does not reflect what most people believe. In our most recent paper, we argue that social media acts like a funhouse mirror, exaggerating and amplifying certain voices and behaviors while diminishing others. This warping of reality happens because social media platforms are dominated by a small, vocal minority of users who post extreme opinions or content. Algorithms further amplify these extremes, giving people the impression that such views and behaviors are the norm, even when they are not.

How social norms become distorted online

Social norms are the unwritten rules that dictate acceptable behavior within a group or society. Norms are strongly tied to our social identity- what norms people follow often signals what social group they belong to, and strengthens ties with ingroup members. Humans naturally rely on cues from their environment to form a sense of these norms. In offline settings, this process—called ensemble encoding—helps us efficiently interpret social signals by summarizing the average behavior or opinions within a group.

However, on social media, this process becomes distorted because the environment is skewed. A small percentage of users generate the majority of content, and their posts tend to be extreme, polarizing, or highly emotional. Meanwhile, the majority of people who ‘lurk’ on the internet either do not post or post moderate opinions far more infrequently; thus, extreme opinions are overrepresented in the online space. For instance:

This small, vocal minority effectively shapes the "norms" people perceive online, leading to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance—where people incorrectly believe that these exaggerated online norms represent what most others think or do offline.

What are the norms that shape online discourse?

The content promoted on social media is dominated by the most extreme opinions which are often highly engaging—either because they spark outrage, debate, or surprise. Negative and divisive content is particularly likely to go viral, as algorithms prioritize posts that generate high engagement (likes, shares, and comments). For example:

• News stories that express hostility toward political out-groups are more likely to be shared.

• On platforms like Instagram, extreme beauty standards are reinforced through highly curated and filtered images, leading users to believe that unrealistic appearances are the norm.

This skewed environment can have harmful consequences, such as:

1. Influencing Real-Life Behaviors:

   • For example, teens exposed to extreme drinking content online may believe that binge drinking is normal and acceptable, increasing the likelihood of risky behavior.

2. Exaggerating Political Divisions:

   • Users often believe their political opponents hold more extreme views than they do in reality, leading to hostility and polarization.

3. Reinforcing Unrealistic Expectations:

   • Social media feeds filled with perfect success stories or idealized lifestyles can leave people feeling inadequate and promote mental health issues like depression and anxiety.

Why false norms are worse online than offline

Social media platforms profit by keeping users engaged which creates an attention economy. The algorithms that govern our feeds are designed to maximize engagement by showing users content that elicits strong emotions and keep us online. This creates a feedback loop where users post more extreme content to gain attention.

Posts that are divisive or sensational often perform better, incentivizing the spread of distorted, negative, or extreme content. Social media also allows users to post anonymously or with minimal accountability, making hostile or extreme behaviors more visible. Meanwhile, moderate opinions are often invisible or outright attacked by trolls or content farmers, leading to a warped perception of public sentiment.

What Can Be Done?

Solving this problem requires changes at both individual and systemic levels:

• Platform Design: Social media platforms can—and should—prioritize nuanced and accurate content rather than promoting extreme views for engagement.

• Critical Thinking: Users need to be more aware of how social media warps their perception of reality. Recognizing that online environments amplify extremes can help mitigate their influence.

• Further Research: More studies are needed to understand how online distortions influence offline behaviors and how to counteract these effects effectively.

The "funhouse mirror" of social media creates a world where extremes dominate and moderation or nuance is often invisible. This distortion harms individuals and society by promoting false norms, increasing polarization, and fostering mental health issues.

Without interventions, these online distortions could continue to shape a false sense of reality. There is an urgent need for better awareness and structural changes to ensure that social media reflects a more accurate picture of the world.

Robertson, C.E., del Rosario, K.S., Van Bavel, J.J (2024). Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms. Current Opinion in Psychology, 60, 101918, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101918.

Projects and Publications

We recently published a paper showing that climate change terminology does not make a difference when encouraging people to take climate action. Journalists and activists have created a number of terms to try and raise awareness about the dangers of global warming, such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global boiling’. However, in a global mega-study (N = 6,132 across 63 countries) we conducted on climate beliefs and actions, none of these terms had an effect on whether people chose to take action against climate change! This paper was led by our PhD student Danielle Goldwert, former postdocs, Kim Doell and Madalina Vlasceanu, and Jay Van Bavel, and published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. You can read it in full here.

News and Announcements

Jay was named one of the most highly cited researchers in the world by Clarivate Analytics. This award recognizes that “each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science™ over the past decade… This list, based on citation activity is then refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgment as we observe for evidence of community-wide recognition from an international and wide-ranging network of citing authors.” Congrats to Jay and all our lab members and collaborators who contributed to these papers!

This summary of our initial article was generated by ChatGPT and edited by Sarah Mughal and Jay Van Bavel. If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this week, folks - take care, and we’ll see you next month!

“Compared to other high-income countries, the United States has a disadvantage when it comes to the health of its citizens,” says Jay Van Bavel, a Professor of Psychology and the lead author of the new paper, in the latest issue of the journal Nature Medicine. “America’s growing political polarization is only exacerbating this shortcoming.”

Over the past four decades, the paper’s authors note, partisan animosity has steadily increased in the US. By 2020, Americans were much more likely to say they “hate” the opposite party than they were to say they “love” their own party; by contrast, from 1980 through 2008, Americans were more likely to say they loved their own party than they were to say they hated the opposite party—though “party love” relative to “opposite party hate” has drawn closer virtually every year since 1980, becoming approximately even in 2012 and with “hate” surpassing “love” beginning in 2016. 

Partisan animosity in the United States has steadily increased from 1980 to 2020. The estimates on the y axis reflect the strength of in-party love minus out-party hate. Adapted with permission from Science magazine: Finkel et al., 2020:

But despite the challenges of political polarization, our analysis, which considered more than 100 experimental papers and reviews, pointed to potential ways to both minimize its impact on Americans’ health and promote health-care practices.

“Division is a major problem and the one real solution is trust. Public health agencies need to work with trusted voices and leaders, being proactive at sharing information, engaging questions, and not writing off concerns as irrelevant,” says Kai Ruggeri, a Professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and one of the paper’s authors. “In a time when some people look less to doctors and more to prominent figures for information on decisions related to our health, the best steps involve engaging directly with those voices.”

The paper, which also included Eric Knowles, a Professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology, and Shana Kushner Gadarian, a Professor in Syracuse University’s Department of Political Science, considered Americans’ views of the opposite party, health-related behaviors during the coronavirus pandemic, and comparative data from other countries.

In their analysis and review, the paper also examined a range of health-care related studies, which found the following:

• As individuals move further from the political center—in either direction—there is a deterioration in individual and public health, such as trust in medical expertise, participation in healthy behaviors, and preventive practices, ranging from healthy diets to vaccination. Notably, individuals who are more ideologically extreme than their state’s average voter have worse physical and mental health.

• Polarization affects what health information people are willing to believe and shapes the relevant actions they are willing to take. This may mean disregarding accurate information or believing misinformation—depending on whether or not it comes from sources they are politically aligned with or disagree with.

• Political leaders, inside and outside the US, may make public health worse by linking health behavior to partisan identity rather than medical needs or expert advice, thereby undercutting the role of expertise and ignoring approaches grounded in science, often leading to attacks on medical professionals and the healthcare system.

• Republicans were less likely to enroll in marketplace insurance plans through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) than were Democrats after most of its provisions took effect a decade ago. These differences have been linked to excess sick days from work, higher healthcare premiums, and higher mortality rates.

• As policy polarization at the state level has increased over time, so has the difference in lifespan and health across states—Americans who live in states with more progressive social policies, such as generous Medicaid coverage, higher taxes on cigarettes, more economic support (e.g., a higher minimum wage), and more firearm regulations live longer than their counterparts in states that embrace more conservative policies.

• After the Trump administration and other Republican leaders expressed skepticism regarding COVID-19 prevention behaviors, partisan elites and news sources amplified this belief and polarized Republicans readily accepted it: large gaps in distancing and then vaccination rates between Republicans and Democrats widened during the pandemic, even as evidence mounted about the risks.

• These differences were not limited to the US: a previous study of 23 European countries found that national levels of partisan polarization accounted for nearly 39% of the variation in vaccination levels.

• Notably, another study of 67 countries found almost no correlation at all between left/right political ideology and support for public health recommendations, suggesting that polarization, rather than political ideology, was the greater risk factor to their citizens’ health.

The authors write that “although polarization is a risk factor for disease and mortality in a public health crisis, this outcome is not inevitable.” They point to a study comparing the US and Canada that suggests policy and leadership decisions can mitigate the potential harm from polarization. Although both nations were politically polarized at the onset of the pandemic, research found that political leaders in Canada took a different approach to those in the United States and also experienced a significantly lower level of illness and mortality.

This and other studies point to specific approaches public officials and health-care professionals can take, which the Nature Medicine authors outline:

• Highlight shared identities between public health officials and target populations—these can include shared partisan identities, nonpartisan identities, or national identities.

• Communicate information about how many people are following public health guidelines—instead of focusing on people who are failing to follow it.

• Use trusted civic leaders—such as religious, athletic, and military spokespersons—to expand and supplement health messages from local and national leaders and reach diverse communities.

• Debunk misleading or false information using fact checks, pre-bunking, and other validated strategies

“Polarization is not only an American concern, but one that is increasing in many countries,” says Syracuse’s Shana Gadarian. “This means we should be investing more in understanding and diminishing its impact on public health by encouraging collaborations between medical professionals and social scientists.”

This month’s newsletter was originally a press release from NYU’s press office, written by James Devitt and with edits from jay Van Bavel. You can read the original here.

New Papers and Preprints

We just published a paper on intellectual humility, where we propose that intellectual humility functions on both the individual and collective level. The paper discusses how intellectual humility might be easier to reach as a collective, and potential barriers to building collective intellectual humility. You can read more here. This paper included Philip Parnamets, Aleksandra Cichocka, Jay Van Bavel, and several other collaborators.

We recently published a preprint on people’s perceived alignment with generative AI in 6 different countries. While people generally feel that generative AI does not align with their values, alignment varies greatly across countries. People in Eastern countries (such as India and Indonesia) are far more trusting and optimistic about genAI compared to people in Western countries, despite many genAI technologies being developed in the West. Read more in the preprint here! This work was led by Laura Globig, Rachel Xu, Steve Rathje, and Jay Van Bavel.

The preprint for our Twitter field study also came out recently. Over two digital field experiments, we find that unfollowing hyperpartisan influencers reduced partisan animosity, increased satisfaction with Twitter, and led people to share higher quality news. Read more in the preprint here. This paper was led by Steve Rathje, Sander van der Linden, Clara Pretus, James He, Trisha Harjani, Jon Roozenbeek, Kurt Gray, and Jay Van Bavel.

Postdoc Tobia Spampatti recently published a paper on how partisanship affects receptiveness to climate change information. Conservatives were worse at recognizing false information that aimed to delay climate action, and were more likely to misidentify true climate change information as false after being exposed to disinformation. You can read the entire paper in the Harvard Misinformation Review here.

We also published a review paper on how social media distorts how people perceive social norms. Social norms online tend to be more extreme than norms offline, which can create false perceptions of those norms, also known as pluralistic ignorance. You can read the entire paper here. This paper was led by Claire Robertson, Kareena del Rosario, and Jay Van Bavel.

A/V Spotlight

The NYU Social Psychology department recently hosted an academic job panel where faculty members (including Jay!) answered questions from PhD students and post-docs. If you want to hear the discussion, you can check it out on our YouTube channel. Huge thanks to lab members Laura Globig and Kareena del Rosario for organizing the event!

News and Announcements

Jay was recently interviewed by PBS News Hour, where he talked about our lab’s work on how a minority of social media users create a distorted reality on social media. Listen to the full clip here!

Jay was also featured on the Culture Matters podcast, where he discussed the science of social identities, and how we can use it to build healthy organizations and societies. Listen to the entire episode here!

Jay was interviewed by News Medical, where he talked about our recent review on political polarization and health. You can read the entire news story here.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this week, folks - take care, and we’ll see you next month!

This turn of events feels particularly disturbing because it often violates the norms of healthy political discourse. As former New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” When someone invokes Pizzagate or stop the steal, they might as well be talking about Bigfoot, chemtrails, or UFO abuctions. It puts an immediate halt to any semblance of a rational debate. So why does it feel like so many people have gone in this direction?

Our paper, “Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation”, explains how and why people’s social identities influence what they believe—even when it’s factual wrong. In this article, we explain how misinformation spreads and how partisanship—our identification with political parties—can distort our understanding of the world. People's social identity plays a crucial role in shaping our beliefs and makes us more likely to believe or share false information when it makes our group look good (or, more frequently, when it makes our opponents look bad).

Partisanship extends beyond agreeing with one’s party’s policies and views; it also encompasses people’s sense self-concept. Being a member of a political party can become a central part of people’s identities. Just like people are motivated to see themselves in a positive light, they are also motivated to hold their group (e.g., political party or favorite leader) in high regards.

Sometimes, the motivation to be part of a valuable group (such as social identity goals) is at odds with other goals such as the goal to accurately represent the world (such as accuracy goals). For example, social media users might repost misleading or inaccurate posts to get engagement and approval from their like-minded followers.

Our Identity-Based Model of Political Belief explains how the push and pull between social identity goals and accuracy goals shapes people’s political beliefs, (biased) information processing, and sharing of (mis)information. According to this model, social identity goals can override accuracy goals, and vice versa. Most people value accuracy much of the time. But when people prioritize social ties and belongingness to their party over accuracy, they align their beliefs with other party members rather than facts. 

In the context of (mis)information, this means that people might ignore factual information if it threatens their positive partisan identity, emphasizing flattering and validating information instead. In lieu of accuracy concerns, people might believe or share false information simply because it reinforces their positive beliefs about their party, or they want to signal their party loyalty. For example, many supporters of Donald Trump believed and spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election because it helped satisfy their need for belonging and sense of superiority, although the facts said otherwise.

Group norms also affect the spread of misinformation. If groups tolerate, validate, or even encourage the spread of dubious and false information, motivation for fact-checking or correction is low. On the other hand, groups that uphold norms of rigorous fact checking, like scientists, are much less likely to spread and be susceptible to misinformation.

Taken together, the model proposes that misinformation can serve a multitude of social goals, like belongingness and group signaling, rather than purely informational functions, and can reinforce group norms on information sharing. This is why simply providing factual corrections to misinformation doesn’t always work well (although it tends to be highly effective in non-partisan contexts). For instance, research finds that fact checks tend to be least effective on highly polarized issues—precisely where identity needs outweigh accuracy needs. 

We recently fleshed out the Identity-Based Model of Political Belief model to account for the critical role of informational context in political beliefs and misinformation. Motivated cognition cannot fully explain partisan differences in belief. Partisan differences can also arise, for example, because people are exposed to different information sources. Thus, beliefs and values both play an important role in guiding belief formation and updating.

Our extended model outlines not only how our beliefs are directly shaped by accuracy and social goals, but also how they’re indirectly shaped through selective exposure to information. We may actively seek out news sources that are popular within our party and validate our pre-existing beliefs, and may only deem those particular news sources as trustworthy; although such selective exposure does not always have to be intentional and motivated. Changing or diversifying people’s news sources might therefore be on way to shift people’s beliefs and might be an opportunity to establish common ground between opposing parties. 

This article summary was generated by ChatGPT and edited by Sarah Mughal, Anni Sternisko and Jay Van Bavel. 

Citation: Van Bavel, J. J., Rathje, S., Vlasceanu, M., & Pretus, C. (2024). Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101787

A/V Spotlight

On the issue of false beliefs, check out this clip of Jay speaking on a panel at this year’s APA conference! He discusses factors that facilitate the spread of misinformation, and what to do about it. Watch it here. 

New Preprints and Papers

Our paper “People Think That Social Media Platforms DO (but Should Not) Amplify Divisive Content” was officially published in Psychological Science! We find that people report seeing divisive, misleading, and negative content go viral, but that they don’t that type of content to go viral; rather, they want positive, educational content to be what they see on social media. This paper was led by Steve Rathje, Claire Robertson, Billy Brady, and Jay Van Bavel. You can read it here. 

Rathje, S., Robertson, C., Brady, W. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). People Think That Social Media Platforms Do (but Should Not) Amplify Divisive Content. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(5), 781-795.

We also have a new paper analyzing the impact of political polarization on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We conclude that a large part of the death toll of COVID-19 was preventable and due to the polarization of the pandemic. We also discuss public policy changes that can be made to avoid these mistakes in future public health crises. This paper was led by Jay Van Bavel, Clara Pretus, Steve Rathje, Philip Parnamets, Madalina Vlasceanu, and Eric Knowles. You can read it here. 

Van Bavel, J. J., Pretus, C., Rathje, S., Pärnamets, P., Vlasceanu, M., & Knowles, E. D. (2024). The Costs of Polarizing a Pandemic: Antecedents, Consequences, and Lessons. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(4), 624-639.

We also had a paper accepted to Current Opinion in Psychology! “Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory: How Social Media Distorts Perceptions of Norms” reviews the evidence behind how social media presents a biased view of social norms, and the consequences thereof. You can read a preprint here. 

Our postdoc Steve Rathje also recently published a new correspondence in Nature, where he argues in favor of regulations to allow researchers access to social media data from big tech companies. You can read it here. 

News and Updates

On October 3rd, Jay will be giving a talk at Vanderbilt Law School about using psychology to combat climate change polarization! Stop by if you’re in the area:

Jay is also giving a talk for the Montessori School of Denver on the Power of Us- you can reserve a free spot at the talk here if you’re in the area!

Jay was recently a guest on the podcast “The Connection”, where he talked about the benefits—and consequences—of being part of a social group. You can listen to the episode here. 

Jay was also a guest on the “Work Life with Adam Grant” podcast, where he discussed our lab’s research the science of virality and how people can find common ground around more uplifting content. You can listen to the podcast here. 

Behavioral science aims to understand and improve the behavior of all humans, yet the Global South remains vastly underrepresented in both participant samples and researchers. This oversight may results in a skewed understanding of behavior. To address this disparity, incoming postdoctoral fellow Rémi Thériault helped develop the Missing Majority Dashboard, which tracks the representation of the lead authors on behavioral science papers from the Global South in 51 behavioral science journals. For more information, please refer to the press release or visit the dashboard directly.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this week, folks - take care, and we’ll see you next month!

Past research has found that we tend to favor members of groups we belong to, and disfavor people who belong to other groups. For example, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno conducted a classic social psychology experiment where they randomly assigned people to groups, and found that people judged the same immoral act (giving a difficult task to someone else and an easy task to yourself) differently based on who was the perpetrator. Giving someone a harder task was judged to be more fair when the person themselves was the perpetrator (self), or when someone from their group was the perpetrator (Ingroup Other, in the figure below). In other words, our moral hypocrisy extends to our fellow group members—we let them off the hook just like we let ourselves off the hook! 

In a recent paper, we tried to replicate Valdesolo & DeSteno’s work and see if their findings still held. We also tried to improve the study in three ways by (1) expanding the sample size (and therefore the statistical power); (2) adding new analyses; and (3) extending the experiment to real-world groups (political partisans), to see if the findings held in real life. We also wanted to see whether how strongly people identified with their groups affected their moral hypocrisy towards in-group members. 

In our first study, we recruited participants from an online survey platform and randomly assigned them to an “overestimator” or an “underestimator” group regardless of their answers on an estimation task. After discussing their group placement in an online chat with three other participants also assigned into these groups, they completed examples of a green “easy” task, and a red “hard” task.

Participants were then told that the researchers were using a new method to determine what tasks participants would complete, where a small subsample of participants would distribute the tasks. These participants could either use a computer randomizer to randomly assign tasks to participants, or they could choose the task they wanted to complete and the researchers would assign the other task to a different participant. Thus, people who chose the easy task for themselves would be forcing another participant to do the hard task, a moral transgression.

Participants were then randomly assigned into one of four conditions: one where they chose what task to complete themselves (most of them chose the easier task!), and three conditions where they were told another participant was choosing a task for them, and ended up with the harder task. In these three conditions, they either didn’t learn anything about the other participant, learned that the other participant was an in-group member, or learned that they were an out-group member. We then conducted a second study where everything was the same, except instead of assigning participants to random groups, we sorted them based on whether they identified as Democrats or Republicans. 

To our surprise, the results did not replicate the result of the original study—but they nevertheless led us to believe that group identity does create moral hypocrisy.

In the random groups experiment, which replicated the original study most closely, we found that people did not evaluate themselves and their ingroup more fairly compared to the out-group and others. However, people who identified more strongly with their group identity did judge in-group members more fairly. Thus, we did find evidence of moral hypocrisy among highly identified group members.

In the experiment with partisans, we again found that people did not evaluate themselves and their ingroup more fairly. However, we found evidence of intergroup moral hypocrisy where people judged their ingroup members as acting significantly more fairly compared to outgroup members.  In other words, moral hypocrisy was alive and well among partisans.

While we didn’t perfectly replicate the results of the initial study, we did find evidence that group membership biases our moral judgment. Specifically, people who identified more strongly with a minimal group showed more in-group favoritism. And partisans judged members of the opposing political party more harshly than their in-group members. We found this pattern among both Democrats and Republicans, which aligns with a general trend of increasing affective polarization and partisan sectarianism in the US even in non-political contexts.

Overall, our work suggests that intergroup biases in moral judgements are driven by in-group favoritism in minimal groups, and out-group derogation in partisans. People have a flexible sense of virtue.

This original work was led by Claire Robertson. This summary was written by Sarah Mughal and edited by Jay Van Bavel. 

Citation: Robertson, C.E., Akles, M., & Van Bavel, J.J. (2024). Preregistered Replication and Extension of “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue”. Psychological Science, 35(7), 798-813. 

New Papers and Preprints

Our paper “The Costs of Polarizing a Pandemic: Antecedents, Consequences, and Lessons” was officially published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. In this paper, we discuss how every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic was polarized, from social distancing to vaxxination, with deadly consequences for public health in the United States. You can read more here. This article was led by Jay Van Bavel, Clara Pretus, Steve Rathje, Philip Parnamets, Madalina Vlasceanu, and Eric Knowles. 

Van Bavel, J. J., Pretus, C., Rathje, S., Pärnamets, P., Vlasceanu, M., & Knowles, E. D. (2024). The Costs of Polarizing a Pandemic: Antecedents, Consequences, and Lessons. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(4), 624-639. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231190395

We also have a new paper out on using GPT for psychological text analysis in PNAS. In this paper, we find evidence that GPT is highly effective in analyzing text for various psychological constructs. We also created a tutorial for researchers to include in their research. You can read more here, and watch the R tutorial on YouTube here. This paper was led by Steve Rathje, Dan-Mircea Mirea, Illia Sucholutsky, Raja Marjieh, Claire Robertson and Jay Van Bavel.

Rathje, S., Mirea, D., Sucholutsky, I., Marjieh, R., Robertson, C., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(34). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2308950121.

News and Announcements

Jay was featured on two different panels at the recent APA convention: one on public health and misinformation, and one on how to write a good popular science book. Check out the a video clip below! 

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At the same convention, lab member Danielle Goldwert presented a poster based on her paper, “The Differential Impact of Climate Interventions Across the Political Divide in 60 Countries”. 

Finally, lab alumni Madalina Vlasceanu won the Raymond S. Nickerson Award from the APA, for her paper “Political and nonpolitical belief change elicits behavioral change”! The Raymond S. Nickerson Award recognizes an article for enduring impact in the area of applied experimental psychology, and for representing an original empirical investigation in experimental psychology that bridges practically oriented problems and psychological theory. Congratulations to Madalina!

Our post-doc Steve Rathje recently wrote a letter to the editor at the New York Times in response to an article on banning smartphones in schools; he wrote on the need for rigorous empirical studies on the use of smartphones in schools before supporting such bans. Read it here!

Jay discussed The Psychology of Identity and Fostering Social Harmony with Scott Barry Kauffman on The Psychology Podcast this week. They discuss how to escape your echo chambers and overcome your biases, the role social media plays in creating a funhouse mirror, and how to make connections with fellow humans even if they're in your out-group.

Lab member Laura Globig will be co-presenting a symposium at SESP’s annual conference. Congrats to Laura on this exciting opportunity!

And in other fun news, our new postdoc Raunak Pillai joined the lab and our research assistant Shaye-Ann McDonald was also visiting NYU from Duke University!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this week folks- see you next week!

Decades of research testing interventions aimed at increasing voting turnout (Green & Gerber, 2019) pointed to several promising strategies, such as nudging implementation intentions (Nickerson & Rogers, 2010), emphasizing social norms (Gerber & Rogers, 2009), triggering social pressure (Rogers, Green, Ternovski, & Young, 2017), or expressing gratitude (Panagopoulos, 2011). However, these interventions have not been tested against each other in the same experiment, hindering the ability to make direct comparisons between strategies (Benartzi et al., 2017). 

We are sharing news about a large megastudy designed to identify and test the top behavioral interventions aimed at increasing voter registration in United States elections, in a large randomized controlled experiment. Their dependent variable is online voter registration ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. 

You can become our coauthor by submitting one of the interventions they select for testing. 

Each submitted intervention should adhere to the following criteria (Voelkel et al., 2024):

·       Ethical: Must receive approval from our Institutional Review Board.

·       Online Deployment: The intervention should be executable online, through the Qualtrics Platform.

·       Scalability: Capable of reaching and impacting a large audience simultaneously.

·       Brevity: The intervention must not exceed 5 minutes in duration.

·       Clarity: Easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience.

·       Cost-Effectiveness: Should not involve monetary incentives for participants.

·       Alignment: Cannot require additional measures beyond the scope of the study.

·       Specificity: Must specifically target voter registration in the USA.

To join the project, submit your intervention using this link by September 1st using this form: https://forms.gle/vS7cfuNhGQvk8d9p6

For any questions, contact Madalina Vlasceanu, Sara Constantino, Robb Willer, Don Green, or Todd Rogers.

Please share this with anyone who might be interested.

The Evolutionary Underpinnings of Moral Cognition

Humans evolved as a highly social species, with much of our innate behavior geared towards navigating social situations and ensuring group cohesion. Early humans developed moral instincts to facilitate cooperation and minimize conflicts within their communities. Violations of cooperative norms, such as causing harm, failing to reciprocate, or betraying group obligations, are seen as morally transgressive and elicited quick, negative reactions. These responses helped build stronger, more successful groups over time by promoting helpful and protective behavior, and reducing in-group violence. As society became more complex over time, so did humans’ moral reasoning, which relies on complex cognitive systems and cultural norms and contextual cues. 

The Internet and Supernormal Moral Stimuli

The internet has drastically changed the scale of social interactions and information dissemination. Unlike earlier technologies like the telephone or mass media, which connected people one-to-one or one-to-many, the internet allows for many-to-many connections without concern for time or distance. This unprecedented connectivity has led to an overabundance of moral content online, far surpassing what people encounter in their offline lives or through traditional media (TV, radio, and newspapers).

Online platforms also exploit humans' attentional preference for morally relevant stimuli. Moral content also captures attention and generates high engagement, leading to frequent sharing and visibility. In turn, this overabundance can have important cognitive consequences, like people perceiving moral transgressions where there aren’t any, or biasing people’s moral evaluations towards negativity. 

The moral content that people are exposed to online is also more extreme than typical moral content, similar to supernormal stimuli. Supernormal stimuli mimic the environmental stimuli that we tend to preferentially attend to, but are more extreme than they would ever be in the natural environment. As a result, moral content online may capture our attention more strongly, and trigger unhealthy behavior in spite of our intentions. 

This combination of the extremity and overabundance of moral content online creates a cyclical process where algorithms aiming to maximize engagement on social media “learn” that the most extreme content is the most successful at garnering online engagement, and prioritize that type of content. We argue that two of the resulting consequences are the disruption of compassion and 3rd party punishment online. 

Compassion and Empathy

Compassion and empathy evolved to foster cooperation and care within groups. However, it is also a limited cognitive resource and in an online context, empathy is strained by the vast number of victims and the distant nature of social connections. The internet exposes individuals to an unprecedented scale of suffering, which can lead to emotional numbness and reduced prosocial behavior. When people are overloaded with requests for empathy, people find assigning blame easier than having empathy.

Since social media is overloaded with such stimuli, this may lead to people assigning blame more often, rather than empathizing with a victim in response to moral transgressions. People may also grow increasingly numb to the endless suffering they see on social media. Online empathy is often weaker than offline empathy, and low-cost actions like "liking" or "sharing" can create a false sense of moral action due to moral licensing, reducing genuine efforts to help. This can weaken collective efforts at organizing as well, since people can get social credit for supporting a cause without making genuine change. 

Witnessing moral transgressions spurs a desire to punish wrongdoers, a behavior that is deeply rooted in human evolution. In small groups, third-party punishment helped deter cheating and fostered group cohesion. However, online, the scale and anonymity of interactions change the dynamics. The internet allows for massive, often disproportionate, public shaming, where thousands can target a single individual without personal stakes. This can incentivize virtue signaling, where people engage in moral grandstanding to enhance their social image rather than effecting real change.

Supernormal Distance and Ineffective Collective Action

The physical and psychological distance between online users undermines the traditional functions of punishment and collective action. Online shaming and punishment are rarely costly to the punisher, making them ineffective signals of group commitment. This leads to superficial signaling and can reduce the perceived sincerity of moral outrage. Additionally, online activism often results in broad but shallow engagement, which may raise awareness but fails to drive meaningful, lasting policy changes.

To mitigate these issues, future research should focus on developing interventions that reduce negative outcomes related to online compassion and punishment. Researchers need greater access to social media algorithms to understand their impact on behavior and emotion. Collaborative efforts across cultures are also essential to test evolutionary hypotheses and develop effective strategies.

Mass sharing on the internet can be helpful. For example, social media has been credited with facilitating demonstrations of collective action around the globe such as the Arab Spring, MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. The internet has brought unprecedented connectivity and access to information, but it also challenges our evolved moral instincts in ways that can be harmful to individuals and society.

Understanding these challenges is crucial for navigating and shaping the online environment to prevent maladaptive outcomes. While the internet offers many benefits and has been used as a tool for collective organizing and platforming disenfranchised voices, its structure and incentives currently exploit our moral instincts, leading to negative consequences that should be addressed through thoughtful design and regulation.

FULL ARTICLE: Claire E Robertson, Azim Shariff, Jay J Van Bavel, Morality in the anthropocene: The perversion of compassion and punishment in the online world, PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 6, June 2024, pgae193, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae193

This summary of the article was edited by Sarah Mughal and Jay Van Bavel.

Video & Audio Spotlight

Jay recently gave a talk on “The science of misinformation and what we can do about it” at the United Nation’s Division for Inclusive Social Development webinar. You can watch a recording of his talk here.

Events

We are excited to announce that lab member Steve Rathje just won a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award for his research examining the causal impact of social media on our attitudes, beliefs, and well-being!

Our lab hosted an interactive history event with Greg Trefry from VOXPOP. VOXPOP bring civics and history to life in the classroom using media-rich, collaborative, role-playing experiences. We are planning a collaboration to see how these role-playing experiences impact interpersonal and intergroup relations in the classroom. To see how it works, we simulated Shay’s Rebellion at a lab meeting. Tons of fun. Highly recommended!

Jay and Jon Freeman recently organized a joint picnic with NYU and Columbia’s Psychology Departments at Central Park. Thanks to everyone who joined us!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this month, folks- take care, and we’ll see you next month!

“The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.” - Stephen Hawking, 2016

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) stands out from traditional automation for its ability to produce novel outcomes. It can generate code, essays, and even poetry. The implications are profound, with the potential to reshape nearly every branch of society. Our new article explores some of the more likely positive and negative effects of GenAI on information and three information-intensive sectors: work, education, and healthcare. 

In the article, we examine the paradox of GenAI: its potential to exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities while simultaneously unlocking extraordinary opportunities for shared prosperity. We propose 72 specific research questions that promise to propel our understanding of the implications of this technology forward. Here, we summarize key directions and possibilities for GenAI in five different domains of research.

Generative AI could exacerbate the spread of misinformation, but also reduce it

Generative AI promises personalization and broader access to information. However, it also raises substantial concerns about the spread of misinformation through advanced and personalized “deepfakes”. For instance, AI’s capability to micro-target voters with persuasive fake content could significantly impact elections.

Yet, it also opens the door to new applications. One study found that discussion with genAI can significantly reduce conspiracy beliefs among conspiracy believers. This highlight its potential to answer conspiracy believers’ complex questions about conspiracies and reduce false beliefs. 

Generative AI could decrease inequalities in the workplace, but also increase them

Previous digital technologies have often skewed benefits towards more educated workers while displacing less-educated workers through automation, a trend known as “Skill-Biased Technological Change”. By contrast, genAI promises to enhance rather than replace human capabilities, potentially reversing this adverse trend. Studies have found that AI tools like chat assistants and programming aids can significantly boost productivity and job satisfaction—especially for less-skilled workers. This can reduce inequality.

Nonetheless, uneven access to AI technologies could worsen existing inequalities if people who lack digital infrastructure or skills get left behind. For example, genAI is may not benefit people in the Global South as much in the near term due to deficits in digital infrastructure, local researchers, and broader digital skills training.

Generative AI can personalize teaching, but also increase the gender gap

Generative AI can enhance personal support and adaptability in learning. Chatbot tutors, for instance, are set to transform educational settings by providing real-time, personalized instruction and support. This technology can realize the dream of dynamic, skill-adaptive teaching methods that directly respond to student needs without constant teacher intervention.

Yet, it must be carefully implemented to avoid perpetuating or introducing biases. For instance, a study revealed that female students report using ChatGPT less frequently than their male counterparts. This disparity in technology usage could not only have immediate effects on academic achievement, but also contribute to future gender gap in the workforce.

Generative AI can help clinicians make better choices, but also lead to mistakes

Generative AI could democratize services by augmenting human capacities and reducing workloads, thus making medical care more accessible and affordable. It can also aid clinicians in diagnosis, screening, prognosis, and triaging. For example, one study found that the integration of human and AI judgement led to superior performance compared to either alone, highlighting effective human-AI collaboration dynamics in medical decision-making. 

Alas, diagnostic performance of some expert physicians may not be improved by AI. Another study found that in fact may cause incorrect diagnoses in situations that otherwise would have been correctly assessed. This highlights the need for balanced integration that supplements rather than replaces human interaction.

Policy making in the age of generative AI

The widespread adoption of generative AI models has prompted governments globally to develop regulatory frameworks. In the last section of the article, we review the EU, UK, and US approaches. Our main observation is that these regulatory frameworks generally overlook the socioeconomic inequalities influenced by AI deployment. 

We propose a number of specific policy suggestions, aimed at balancing AI innovation with social equity and consumer protection. Future regulatory improvements should include equitable tax structures, empowering workers, controlling consumer information, supporting human-complementary AI research, and implementing robust measures against AI-generated misinformation. 

The future of GenAI is now

We find ourselves at a critical historical crossroads, where today’s decisions will have global consequences for generations to come. It is an exciting, yet daunting moment to be alive, charged with heavy responsibilities. Each of us—whether as researchers, policy makers, or engaged citizens—will play a crucial role as an architect of the future and can contribute to driving the course towards the positive use of what could be humanity’s greatest innovation, or its worst.

FULL ARTICLE: Valerio Capraro, Austin Lentsch, Daron Acemoglu, Selin Akgun, Aisel Akhmedova, Ennio Bilancini, Jean-François Bonnefon, Pablo Brañas-Garza, Luigi Butera, Karen M Douglas, Jim A C Everett, Gerd Gigerenzer, Christine Greenhow, Daniel A Hashimoto, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Jolanda Jetten, Simon Johnson, Werner H Kunz, Chiara Longoni, Pete Lunn, Simone Natale, Stefanie Paluch, Iyad Rahwan, Neil Selwyn, Vivek Singh, Siddharth Suri, Jennifer Sutcliffe, Joe Tomlinson, Sander van der Linden, Paul A M Van Lange, Friederike Wall, Jay J Van Bavel, Riccardo Viale, The impact of generative artificial intelligence on socioeconomic inequalities and policy making, PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 6, June 2024, pgae191, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae191

This month’s newsletter was drafted by Valerio Capraro and edited by Jay Van Bavel.  

Video and Audio Spotlight

Jay recently gave a talk on the SCIENCE OF MISINFORMATION and what we can do about it at the Health Quality BC conference last month. You can watch it for free here.

New papers and preprints

In a new theory paper, we argue that our evolutionary instincts are mismatched for our modern technological ecosystem. Access to the internet means access to millions of morally charged posts, more than we would have encountered as humans evolved in small social groups. This combined with the psychological distance between people on the internet can lead to virtue signalling on important moral issues, and ineffective collective action. You can read it here. This paper was led by lab members Claire Robertson and Jay Van Bavel, as well as collaborator Azim Shariff.

We also have a preprint out on the link between identity rhetoric, online attention, and the electoral success of political leaders. Analyzing over 750,000 social media posts, we find that politicians on both sides of the political divide benefit from positive identity rhetoric on social media, such as expressing national pride. However, only right-wing politicians benefited from expressing defensive identity rhetoric, like national entitlement. You can read the preprint here. This paper was led by Stefan Leach, Aleksandra Cichocka, and Jay Van Bavel. 

Several of our lab’s papers were recently featured in a recent New York Times opinion piece discussing academic research on partisan animosity. You can read the NYT op-ed here and one of the original papers here. Here is a quote from the article:

Jay was also interviewed by the New York Times in a piece about the recent trend of people listening to videos and podcasts without headphones, loudly, in public. He explains why it’s difficult to confront people breaking social norms. You can read more about it here. 

News and Announcements

We’re excited to announce that, beginning in August, Tobia Spampatti will be joining our lab as a post-doctoral scholar! Funded by a postdoctoral fellowship grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he will be investigating the effects and psychological factors of online climate (dis)Information. Welcome, Tobia!

We are so proud to announce that our PhD student, Claire Robertson, successfully defended her Ph.D dissertation! She will be continuing on in the lab as a joint post-doc here at NYU’s Department of Psychology, and at the Rotman School of Business at University of Toronto. Congratulations to Doctor Claire!!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this month, folks- take care, and we’ll see you next month!

We are now part of a global study that aims to expand these findings around the globe. Specifically, we will investigating how several interventions impact behavioral indicators of cooperation, social distance, and interconnectivity, as well as the extent to which individual traits influence these outcomes on political polarized individuals. We also plan to measure other key traits that could be relevant to intergroup conflict, such as morality, intellectual humility, collective narcissism, and others.

In this call for collaborators, we invite researchers from around the world to help us conduct this study. We aim to recruit 1,500 participants in each country. Collaborators' invaluable contributions to this project would involve:

• Facilitating the translation and adaptation of interventions to align with your cultural context. This entails translating scripts and texts, securing six people who represent the demographic characteristics of your nation to record video interventions, and ensuring technical capabilities for Zoom call recordings, which may be required for certain interventions.

• Conducting a meticulous back-translation process for the set of questionnaires and instruments employed in the study. The back-translation of questionnaires will maintain consistency across all participating countries, thereby ensuring the integrity of our data collection process.

• Funding (fully or partially) the data collection. We have a limited budget to support collaborators who are unable to fund this themselves, but we encourage those who can to assist others in this cooperative effort. 

• Helping with analysis, editing, and writing throughout the publication process.

Since we plan to submit this project as a registered report (target journal: Nature or Nature Human Behaviour), our specific methods, plans, and timeline may change pending reviewer comments.

On May 24th, we shared an initial call for collaborators via social media to gather researchers interested in joining us in this journey. About 170 researchers have already indicated interest in helping us to conduct this study in 43 countries. All participating countries are marked in the world map below (in blue). We are especially interested in collaborators from the other nations (in light grey):

This project is led by Bruna E. F. Mota and the head PI team is composed of Ana Luísa Freitas, Beatriz Bezerra de Souza, Ruth Lyra Romero, Waldir M. Sampaio, and Fernanda Naomi Pantaleão, from the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (SCN Lab) at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and the National Institute of Science and Technology on Social and Affective Neuroscience (INCT-SANI, CNPq - Brazil). We have worked together alongside Jay Van Bavel (New York University), Robb Willer (Stanford University), and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University). This study is supervised by Paulo Boggio (SCN Lab and INCT-SANI).

To join the Global Many Lab Cooperation Project, fill out this short survey ASAP. If you have any queries, please contact us: manylabscooperation@gmail.com

Please share this with anyone who might be interested.

Polarization is a major barrier to fighting climate change. Many studies have found that liberals accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change more than conservatives.

Given this gap, one might think they would also be more likely to engage in real-world climate actions. However, our recent new finding from a global megastudy, involving 51,224 participants from 60 countries challenge the straightforward link between beliefs and actions and suggest a pathway to help overcome the polarization of climate changeOur paper is called “The differential impact of climate interventions along the political divide in 60 countries” and was published in the most recent issue of Nature Communications (the authors were Michael Berkebile-Weinberg, Danielle Goldwert, Kim Doell, Jay Van Bavel, and Madalina Vlasceanu). 

A phenomenon known as the “green gap” reflects the disparity between what people believe about climate change and their actual climate actions. Our study examined whether the political polarization in climate change beliefs manifests as polarization regarding climate actions, such as investing effort and time to generate tree-planting donations. Liberals who believe strongly in climate change may not engage in climate actions, while skeptical conservatives might still participate in actions that benefit the environment. 

Our study also tested eleven targeted interventions developed by experts in the field. Some interventions include promoting scientific consensus (e.g., presenting information that 99% of experts agree on climate change facts), writing a letter to future generations (e.g., thinking about how one’s current actions impact future generations), and emphasizing collective actions (e.g., featuring examples of successful collective efforts that have solved past global issues, such as the restoration of the ozone layer). 

Overall, most people around the world believed in human caused climate change and supported a wide variety of policies to reduce it (exceeding 75% of our total sample).We also observed worldwide polarization in climate change beliefs and policy support, with liberals generally showing higher levels of both compared to conservatives. However, this polarization did not extend to the amount of effort and time invested in a climate-relevant task—liberals and conservatives were equally likely to engage in the tree-planting donation task (see the figure below). Their efforts led us to plant over 300,000 trees.

These findings challenge the traditional assumption that beliefs drive behavior. Instead, the green gap among liberals suggests that factors such as cognitive biases, perceived personal costs, and social norms can disrupt the direct translation of environmental beliefs into real environmental action. 

Likewise, the mismatch between climate skeptics’ beliefs and behaviors has also been documented. For example, conservative farmers regularly adopt pro-environmental practices despite lacking belief in anthropogenic climate change. This suggests that a narrow focus on changing hearts and minds might not be a silver bullet for fighting climate change.

So, who is to blame for this green gap? Are liberals failing to put their money where their mouth is and act on their strong beliefs in climate change? Or are conservatives more inclined to engage in climate mitigation actions than their beliefs alone might suggest? Our data align more closely with the latter: conservatives are willing to act despite their beliefs, rather than liberals failing to act on theirs.

This is promising news for pro-environmental efforts: the political resistance to accepting climate change or supporting climate policies does not necessarily translate into a behavioral resistance to engaging in at least one type of individual-level climate action. There may be actions that transcend political divides where people are willing to take action immediately.

While conservatives may not partake in climate actions due to their beliefs about climate change they may nevertheless engage for reasons that align with conservative values, such as preserving natural beauty. 

Additionally, direct actions like tree planting can allow them to contribute positively without endorsing large-scale government policies. In fact, it might help them develop an identity as someone who cares about the environment. This might help them see the benefit of environmental and climate policies. 

While some critics have argued that supporting policy and individual action are negatively related, we find the exact opposite! Across every measure, individual actions were positively correlated with support for system politics. This offers hope that bridging divides through real world actions may ultimately build consensus for broader changes.

Effectiveness of Psychological Interventions

Of course, climate change extends beyond our generation.. This may be why an intervention  like writing to future generations increased both conservative and liberal support for climate policies!  Other interventions, like emphasizing the scientific consensus around climate change, spurred action only among liberals.

 This underscores the need for ideologically tailored approaches in promoting climate beliefs and behaviors. Other interventions that reduced psychological distance or promoted future-self continuity also had positive effects on both liberal and conservative climate beliefs and policy support. 

Interestingly, while these interventions helped bridge the belief gap, conservative actions were paradoxically reduced by several interventions that otherwise bolstered their climate beliefs or policy support. The fact that no single intervention significantly boosted conservative climate actions suggests that future research is needed to develop and test new methods to activate this demographic’s practical engagement with climate solutions, without necessarily relying on changing their underlying beliefs.

To explore the effects of our interventions across the globe, we have created a simple, user-friendly web-app that is freely available. This tool allows users to see how effective interventions are in different countries, by age groups, and by political ideologies. While we caution users not to rely on evidence from groups that are too small (e.g., sample sizes should include at least 30 people), it is a powerful, easy-to-use tool that policymakers, academics, journalists, and beyond can use to help better understand the effectiveness of the interventions in their people.

By understanding the underlying values and motivations of different groups, policymakers and activists can craft more effective and inclusive campaigns that not only increase awareness but also motivate real-world action. Rather than trying to eliminate differences in how conservatives and liberals approach climate actionwe should focus on amplifying positive efforts across the spectrum.  By engaging conservatives and liberals in ways that align with their respective values—whether it's the pragmatic beauty of conservation or the urgent need for scientific action– we can enhance the collective effort to combat climate change. 

Tackling this problem will ultimately require all of us. So we should harness the best of both worlds to foster a more sustainable future.

Use this link to read the full paper.

This newsletter was adapted from an Op-Ed written by Danielle Goldwert and Kim Doell by Sarah Mughal, and edited by Jay Van Bavel; you can read the original here.

New Papers and Pre-Prints

Our pre-registered replication of “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue” was recently published in Psychological Science.The original experiment by Valdesolo & DeSteno found that group identity influences hypocrisy such that people are more forgiving of immoral acts committed by in-group members compared to out-group members, which has become a foundation of moral psychology. Although experiments failed to replicate the original paper’s effects, we nevertheless found evidence for intergroup moral hypocrisy. Specifically, we found evidence of in-group favoritism in minimal groups and out-group derogation in political groups. This paper was led by Claire Robertson, Madison Ackles and Jay Van Bavel.

Our commentary for Brain and Behavioral Sciences,l was also published. Weargue that social media algorithms hijack people’s innate tendency to pay attention to threatening stimuli, by pushing controversial and upsetting content in people’s social media feeds; however, this is not the type of content that people express they would like to see. You can read more here. This paper was led by Claire Robertson, Kareena del Rosario, Steve Rathje and Jay Van Bavel.

We also published a paper in PNAS Nexus about the impacts of generative AI on information, education, healthcare, and work, with a focus on how generative AI can both reduce and exacerbate inequality in these domains. Jay was a co-author on this paper with a group of experts in these areas.

Finally, we also shared a new preprintarguing that moral expressions are flexible and responsive to social norms due to different kinds of goals that govern social influence. Read it here. This paper was led by Kareena del Rosario, Tessa West and Jay Van Bavel.

Outreach

Jay was recently interviewed by  the New York Times in an article  called ‘Why losing political power now feels like ‘losing your country’. You can read it here. 

Jay also gave a plenary talk (and workshop with the Clarity Foundation) discussing misinformation and ways to combat it to several hundred doctors and nurses at HQBC! You can watch his talk here.

News and Announcements

We’re very excited to announce that Anni Sternisko will be joining the Social Identity and Morality Lab as an Associate Research Scientist! She will be heavily involved in helping us grow and develop the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. You can read her bio below:

Anni obtained her Ph.D. in social psychology from New York University with Jay and her B.A. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She is interested in the social dynamics of conspiracy theory beliefs, polarization, and ideology. Anni has used her expertise to advise organizations on information campaigns, depolarization programs, and non-violent communication training. She also serves as an Expert Affiliate with the United Nations Team of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, which holds permanent consultative status at the U.N. In this role, she has worked on issues such as environmental injustice, data-driven policy making, and sustainable development.

Kim Doell (kimdoell.com), a former postdoc in the Social Identity and Morality Lab, is starting a new, exciting research group called the Environmental Collective (ECo) Behaviour Group, and they are looking for a PostDoc (https://stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/3b405784db68b2edaf6a9cb92909b1d3a8370e0f0)! This group will be at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in the Cluster of Excellence, called the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour (CASCB; https://www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-behaviour/about-us/overview/). Her group aims to address the challenges related to climate change and sustainability through collective efforts and evidence-based solutions. One exciting advantage of this postdoc position is that the candidate will get to help shape the trajectory of the research being done in the group and within the CASCB! For any questions about the position, please get in touch with Kim directly at kimberlycdoell@gmail.com!

Congratulations to lab member Ke Fang for graduating from NYU Gallatin’s School of Individualized Study! He will be pursuing a Ph.D in Social Psychology under the mentorship of Robert Hawkins next year. Best of luck to Ke in his future endeavors!

We would also like to extend a heartfelt congratulations to our new postdoc Laura Globig for successfully defending her Ph.D paper! Here’s a picture from the picnic we had to celebrate:

Lab members Steve Rathje, Laura Globig, Sarah Mughal, and Jay, along with lab collaborator Killian McLoughlin, were announced as finalists for the Prosocial Ranking Challenge! The Prosocial Ranking Challenge is a competition hosted by the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI seeking to test the best social media algorithm that promotes prosocial behaviors. Our algorithm downranks divisive social media content: posts with expressions of moral outrage or negative sentiment, a low ‘likes per retweets’ ratio, and links to low-quality news sites. Posts linking to the lowest quality sites are also replaced.

Our global climate change intervention paper, led by Madalina Vlasceanu, Joe Bak-Coleman, Jay Van Bavel, and Kim Doell, also won the 2024 BSPA Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy! It was selected out of nearly 60 other papers. You can read the paper here. 

We also had a fun lab game night, where we playtested a card game called Publish or Perish made by Max Hui Bai. The game is a funny take on the endless publication cycle that seems to pervade academia. It was a lot of fun! You can check out the pre-order form here.

Our PhD student Danielle Goldwert had an art exhibition up at the New York Public Library in Tribeca! You can check it out for yourself in person until the end of May. Here is her description of her artwork:

“In the stillness of solitude, we find ourselves face-to-face with the essence of our being. This collection of paintings is an introspective journey into the spaces and silences that shape our inner landscapes.  

What does it mean to be alone with one’s thoughts, dreams, and memories? How does the physical environment influence the experience of solitude? This body of work does not aim to answer these questions but to ask them, to stir the silence, and to celebrate the beauty and complexity of being alone.”

We also took a new lab photo!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this month, folks- take care, and we’ll see you next month!

Scholars and platforms have developed different interventions to counter misinformation on social media, but these interventions are often less effective against misinformation that is politically polarizing. To find a better solution, we recently tried to develop an intervention that might work better against polarized content. In a recent paper led by lab alum Clara Pretus, along with Ali Javeed, Diána Huges, Kobi Hackenburg, Manos Tsakiris, Oscar Villaroya, and Jay Van Bavel, we developed and tested an identity-based intervention against misinformation on social media. 

Online moderation is one way to deal with the problem of misinformation, but online moderators often are not familiar with the context of posts or respond to the content long after it has already gone viral. Other interventions such as accuracy nudges (where social media users see visual cues that remind them to be accurate) have also been developed, but a pair of recent meta-analyses find that their effect is relatively weak—especially for conservatives. Thus, a scalable, context-sensitive intervention that is effective across political groups is needed.

We have previously found that people are more likely to believe and share misinformation when they are more motivated by their partisan identity than accuracy goals. However, online misinformation is also set in the context of social media’s interactive environment, where engagement metrics, such as likes, can incentivize (and monetize) the spread of misinformation. Therefore, we tried to design a solution that would incentivize more accurate content by signaling healthier, social norms around reporting fake news.

Specifically, we developed a “Misleading” count added to social media posts (see bottom right in figure below). We simply showed how many in-group members of a user’s political party marked a social media post as misinformation on each social media post (similar to a like or share button). This identity based intervention was tested in both the US and the UK, in three pre-registered online experiments (N = 2513). 

Participants across the political spectrum were asked how likely they would be to share simulated social media posts by different political leaders from their political parties. These posts contained misinformation about politically polarizing issues (e.g., immigration, homelessness, etc). One group of participants were told that the Misleading count showed judgements from their fellow partisans, and another group were told that it reflected judgements from general users. The authors then compared the results of this intervention to other popular online misinformation interventions, like accuracy nudges and Twitter’s official tag that prevents Tweets from being shared, liked, or reposted. 

The number of people who reported they would be likely to share misleading social media posts dropped by 25% in response to the Misleading count showing in-group judgements, as compared with 5% in response to an accuracy nudge. 

The in-group Misleading count was also more effective compared to the Misleading count showing the judgment of general users—and it worked especially well for polarizing issues (see figure below). This underscores the power of in-group norms for reducing the spread of misinformation. This effect was only found in the US, however, which is a more politically polarized context compared to the UK. Strikingly, extreme partisanship did not make the intervention less effective. 

These results provide initial evidence that identity-based interventions may be more effective than neutral ones for addressing partisan-based misinformation. The misleading count may be an effective, crowd-sourced guard against misinformation online. The fact that it seems to be more effective in polarized contexts like the US suggests that such contexts have more incentives for people to conform to partisan group norms, or have more disincentives for not conforming to group norms.  

Our intervention was tested in a series of controlled experiments, using curated social media posts. In order to see if such a button would work on real social media platforms, future research in more ecologically valid contexts is needed. For example, in the real-world, bad actors could use bots to make new accounts and abuse the ‘Misleading’ button on posts that are actually true. 

Pretus, C. G., Javeed, A. M., Hughes, D., Hackenburg, K., Tsakiris, M., Vilarroya, O., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). The misleading count: An identity-based intervention to counter partisan misinformation sharing. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B, 379, 20230040. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0040 

This month’s newsletter was drafted by Sarah Mughal & edited by Jay Van Bavel.

New Papers & Pre-Prints

We published a new paper in Nature Communications on how we can we overcome the polarization on climate action. In a global experiment led by Mike Berkebile-Weinberg, Daniel Goldwert, Jay Van Bavel, Kim Doell and Madalina Vlasceanue we tested the impact of 11 interventions on liberals and conservatives in a large sample (N=51,224) recruited in 60 countries. You can read the paper here.

We also wrote an op-ed about this paper for TIME Magazine if you want to read an accessible summary of our research.

We also posted a new pre-print where we describe how extreme posts on social media distort our perception of what’s normative to believe and what isn’t. The paper brings together research from political science, psychology, and cognitive science to explain how online environments become saturated with false norms, what happens when these online norms deviate from offline norms, and why expressions are more extreme online. This paper was led by Claire Robertson, Kareena del Rosario & Jay Van Bavel, You can read more here. 

News, Announcements & Outreach

Congratulations to lab members Rachel Leshin, Kareena del Rosario, and Claire Robertson for winning a number of the NYU Psychology Department’s 2024 Fellowships and Awards! Rachel Leshin was awarded the Fryer Award for Best Thesis, and Claire Robertson received the Ted Coons Graduate Student Summer Stipend Award. Kareena del Rosario received both the Katzell Summer Fellowship and the Coons Graduate Student Travel Award. Congratulations to all! 

This month, Jay spoke at an event for the World Bank, discussing how people with the most extreme beliefs post on social media more than people with moderate beliefs, leading to social media algorithms only showing polarizing and divisive content. 

He also spoke at the Learning and the Brain conference, talking about the impacts of AI on education to hundreds of educators. Here’s a picture of him and grad student Claire Robertson at our lab’s exhibition booth!

Jay also weighed in on a webinar for PEN America on what journalists can do to counter misinformation in a vital election year. You can read a recap of the webinar here, and watch the Youtube video here:

Jay also was featured on Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English, where he explained 4 dark rules for online engagement. You can listen to the podcast episode on Spotify. 

Jay also spoke with Michael McQueen about polarization, social dynamics, and more, for the Behavior Change for Good Initiative’s Meet the Experts Series! You can watch it here.

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this month, folks- thank you for reading, and we’ll see you next month!

We have general advice that should be helpful for a broad audience on giving great presentations, writing efficiently, goal setting, saying “no”, managing conflict, and mentoring, as well as specific advice for each academic career stage including applying to graduate school, negotiating a job offer, and running a lab. Whether you are just starting to consider graduate school or preparing your tenure materials, this is a roadmap to navigate the hidden curriculum

To read the full column, just click on each header!

Introducing ‘Letters to young Scientists’, a new column from Science Careers

Kicking off the series is the very first column, where each of the 5 contributors introduce themselves and establish the inspiration for starting this column! The contributors are Will Cunningham (Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto), June Gruber (Associate Professor of Psychology & neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder), Neil Lewis, Jr. (Associate Professor of communications & social behavior at Cornell), Leah Somerville (Professor of Psychology at Harvard), and Jay Van Bavel (Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at NYU). The column was inspired by a long tradition of past generations of prominent scientists writing advice for new and upcoming scientists. 

FOR UNDERGRADS:

Applying for a Ph.D? These 10 tips can help you succeed

Navigating the endless application guidelines for Ph.D programs can be an extraordinarily daunting task, so we offer 10 key guidelines applicable across multiple fields of study and schools, to help prospective students prepare the best application they possibly can. These include honing your research statement by asking for feedback from professors and current graduate students, finding departments where you would be interested in working with multiple faculty members, and being true to yourself. We acknowledge that the Ph.D journey is best if you are deeply passionate about scientific research and open to a variety of careers.

To ace your Ph.D program interviews, prepare to answer—and ask—these key questions

You’ve made it past the first round of admissions and finally arrived at the interview. But remember, you’re not only demonstrating how you'd fit into the program, you’re also assessing the program’s fit for you. You should be prepared to answer questions about why you’re applying to graduate school, your career goals, and what research you’d like to pursue. But, you should also prepare questions about things you want to know, like if the training provided fits your goals for after graduate school, and if the culture of the program is supportive.

FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS & POSTDOCS:

How to navigate conflict with your research adviser

Mentorship can be a tricky thing to navigate in academia. In this article, we break down different strategies to approach your advisor based on whether they’re a good, bad, or toxic advisor, and offer advice to current mentors on how they can better their own mentorship. If you have a good advisor, it’s always best to assume good intentions when there’s conflict. But, if you have a bad or toxic advisor, you may need to consider other mentorship options in order to continue your academic journey. 

How to find a postdoc position that’s right for you

Finding a postdoc position can be less straightforward than applying to faculty positions or graduate school. If a postdoc position would help you work towards your long-term goals, we lay out some tips for finding a postdoc position that’s right for you. You should come up with a list of options. Some academics use a postdoc as a way to transition into a new area of focus for their research. Funding is another important consideration—finding your own can be stressful, but might give you more freedom than a predetermined postdoc position for a specific project. 

In the tough academic job market, two principles can help you maximize your chances

The academic job market is competitive and tough to navigate, with random events making it difficult to pin down what works. To increase your chances of landing that interview, it’s important to maximize your signal for what works, and minimize the noise to account for the random factors that affect any job search. You can maximize your signal by crafting your materials to make it easy for any committee reviewing your application and getting feedback on your materials. And, you can minimize the noise by applying to a wide variety of jobs over multiple job cycles, if possible. 

How to put your best foot forward in faculty job interviews

It’s really exciting to receive an interview offer after spending ages laboring over your application materials for a particular job posting! Knowing what the interview will be like can help you figure out where to invest your energy in preparing. Here we describe how common faculty job interviews tend to go, such as a colloquium-style lecture about your research and a day of meetings during an in-person visit. The best thing to do is practice over and over again, and prepare by doing your research on who you’re meeting with in advance. 

Ten tips for negotiating job offers

After the excitement of receiving a job offer fades, many scientists are unsure of how to negotiate their offer. Here we offer some tips if you’re new to the art of negotiating a job offer. For example, it’s important to do some research about how negotiations work and your value on the job market. You can also negotiate more than just your take-home salary; academic negotiations often include start-up research funds, relocation costs, lab and office space, and travel funds. You should negotiate with confidence, and use any other offers you may receive as leverage to get a better package from your preferred position. 

FOR FACULTY

Three keys to launching your own lab

Getting to launch your own lab is an exciting step forward in your academic career, that you often aren’t explicitly trained for. As you get started, be sure to take advantage of all the resources available to you so you can tackle any potential challenges in your new environment. It’s easy to get trapped in the enormous amount of decisions to be made; just getting started on doing anything can be helpful to avoid decision paralysis. Finally, being deliberate about setting up a supportive lab environment with clear expectations can help set up your lab for success in the years ahead.

How to foster healthy scientific independence for yourself and your trainees

While science is inherently a collaborative discipline, learning how to conduct your work without close supervision or oversight is an important part of scientific training. Here we offer advice on how to foster that scientific independence. One good way to start out fostering that independence is by leading a research project on more original work that doesn’t align as closely with your mentor’s work. You can build on that work as you move into becoming a faculty member and develop a unique research direction. As a mentor, it’s important to let your trainees try their hand at writing their own grants, focusing on the collective success of your lab members. 

Three research-based lessons to improve your mentoring

Mentorship in academia can vary between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Learning the science behind good mentoring can help anyone from senior professors to graduate students mentoring their research assistants become a better mentor. For example, we can take lessons learned from research on relationships by providing engagement and support alongside achievable high expectations. Conveying your belief in your student’s abilities and potential, and helping your mentees embrace failure as growth is also vital.

Conflict in your research group? Here are four strategies for finding a resolution

Unfortunately, science is not a purely collaborative environment. Inevitably, conflicts between lab members arise, and it’s important to constructively and effectively deal with such conflict. We offer some tips for managing conflict in a research setting in this article, such as assuming good intentions on the part of the members involved, and listening carefully before making comments, especially if you occupy a position of power in the lab. It may be necessary to document what happens in case the matter needs to be escalated to the university.

FOR ALL CAREER STAGES:

How to write a clear, compelling CV

A polished CV is essential in academia. It provides a far more exhaustive list of a scientist’s credential’s than a typical resume can, including degrees, positions, publications, and presentations; teaching, mentoring, and service activities; and other relevant categories. When writing your CV, it’s important to start with some introduction information like your name, current title and affiliation, and a short summary of your interests and expertise. The order of your sections is also important, since people are more likely to remember the beginning and end of your CV; remember to highlight important information using formatting and stylistic choices. Our last tip is to make sure you continually update your CV by both adding recent accomplishments and trimming older entries for conciseness.

A social media survival guide for scientists

Social media is both a wonderful platform to engage all kinds of people with your scientific research, and a wonderful place to get stuck arguing over rage bait with trolls. Here we offer some advice on how to navigate social media as an academic, like remembering that everything is forever on the internet—so be careful about what you post! It’s also worthwhile to curate your feed by following scientists, labs, journals, and companies that are interesting and relevant to your work; you might come across opportunities that you never would have otherwise. 

Step back to move forward: Setting new goals and priorities

This column offers advice on how to step back and reassess your priorities. After taking time to step back and think about the future you want to achieve, it can help to create plans for your next few months and years ahead to determine if the things you’re spending time on in the present, are aligned with those longer-term goals. Breaking down those goals into short-term, concrete tasks and encouraging yourself even when you get off track is key.

Three tips for giving a great research talk

Great research talks can engage the audience regardless of their background knowledge of the topic, and get the point of the presentation across with precision and conciseness. To do so, you should find a central focus or takeaway for your talk that’s relevant for the audience you’re speaking to. You should present your information clearly, and make sure the details are right for the audience. For example, specialists may be interested in the details of how you conducted your research, but a more general audience might be bored by those particulars. 

Struggling with your academic writing? Try these experiments to get the words flowing

Writing up results in a scientific paper is one of the most important skills you can polish for your academic career. This article offers several ways to enhance your writing skills and output, like embracing the process of revision, or creating a writing group to hold yourself accountable for your writing goals. 

Help funders help you: Five tips for writing effective funding applications

Even if you’re not familiar with writing grant proposals to get funding for your research, you’ve probably already gained experience with the basic skills required over your academic career. Pitching a grant to be funded is not so different from persuading an admissions committee to admit you as a graduate student, or convincing a PI to take you on as a postdoc. Your grant proposal should have, among other things, a clear, testable idea and reasoning behind why testing the idea is important. It’s good to know your funder’s priorities and tailor your proposal accordingly. Like everything, it’s important to be persistent!

A scientist’s guide to email etiquette

Whether you love it or hate it, email makes up a substantial part of being a scientist. Written communication carries with it lots of pitfalls, like a failure to properly convey tone or the potential to erode your work-life boundaries. We offer some tips to manage the deluge of emails you might have on a daily basis, like maintaining professional signatures and writing emails that are concise and courteous. It’s also important to maintain strong work-life boundaries especially in regard to emails; turning off your notifications during your off time or when you need to focus could be beneficial.

How to be an ethical scientist

True discovery takes time, has many stops and starts, and is rarely neat and tidy. It’s easy to forget this, however, when there’s constant pressure in academia to “publish or perish”. We offer some items to reflect on that will allow you to succeed without impairing the broader goals of science. For example, it’s always good to be open to being wrong, and to not overstate your findings. Getting critical feedback and being transparent can help your scientific work be as rigorous as possible. 

Tips for easing the service burden on scientists from underrepresented groups

The work force of academia is often less diverse than the population it draws from. Many departments in academic institutions employ scientists who are the only ones identifying as a member of a particular group (like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), also referred to as being a “solo-status scientist”. Such scientists often perform more service duties than their colleagues, which ends up being time taken away from the activities that are more likely to impress tenure granting committees. This article provides both advice for solo-status scientists who might have additional representative burdens placed on them, and guidelines for their colleagues and academic institutions on how they can reduce the unfair service burden on existing solo-status scientists.

School’s (somewhat) out for summer: Five tips to help make the most out of the season

Summertime is a much more free time for academics. On one hand, it feels like you have all the time in the world to get around to tasks you couldn’t do in the academic year; on the other the lack of structure can lead to a “summer slump”. Some ways to make the most of your summer break include maintaining a structured schedule, taking stock of your current projects to plan out next steps, and actually taking some time off to avoid burnout!

Learn when–and how–to say no in your professional life

It’s tempting to say yes to everything in your early career, especially in academia. However, doing so can easily overwhelm you and reduce the time you have for your core commitments, like writing or mentoring. Before taking on more responsibilities, it’s worthwhile to consider the pros and cons of what’s being proposed to you. It can be scary and difficult to say no as an early-career scientist- so, finding more knowledgeable allies who can help advise and advocate for you can be invaluable. Figuring out how to say know can save you the awkward experience of ghosting a request simply because you didn’t know how to respond, or saying yes just to avoid saying no!

Science relies on constructive criticism. Here’s how to keep it useful and respectful

None of our scientific ideas are perfect, which means they are all destined to be questioned, reinterpreted, and potentially discarded. There are good principles to follow when giving criticism to help reduce some of the anxiety and stress from receiving it. It’s helpful to construct your feedback to minimize personal attacks and focus on being constructive. Embracing intellectual humility and assuming the best of what you’re critiquing is also helpful. When receiving criticism, it’s important to avoid getting defensive and to not take any critiques personally. 

Scientists have passions outside the lab. We should embrace that

In this column, Jay discusses a former post-doc who felt conflicted about sharing news that she had published another fiction book successfully. She felt that sharing this accomplishment might paint her as a scientist who wasn’t as rigorous or devoted to their work compared to others. But, it’s important for everyone in academia to embrace passions outside the lab, for the sake of our working culture and our mental health. 

My lab group met to chart our response to COVID-19. Here’s what we learned

In one of the first columns published during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay describes the steps he and the lab took to figure out how to map out changes to their research program during the pandemic. Written in a time of uncertainty, it’s a fantastic look at how our lab group came together to support one another and change course during a life-changing global crisis. 

Academia needs a reality check: Life is not back to normal

In this article published during the pandemic, we emphasized that life was not yet back to normal even if universities were welcoming students back to campus. We offered three principles to keep in mind during that tumultuous time, like acknowledging that things are not back to normal in a stressful and unprecedented pandemic; respecting child care and other personal needs that people may have; and triaging what work is essential and reasonable to complete. These principles can be applied to any time where external circumstances exert stress on your academic community. 

Why the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to overdue change in academia

In the last of our columns written about the COVID-19 pandemic, our columnists have a conversation to discuss what the pandemic changed about the functioning of their labs, and what changes they intended to keep moving forward. 

This section was drafted by Sarah Mughal and edited by Jay Van Bavel

New Papers & Preprints

Our pre-registered replication of “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue., was officially accepted for publication in Psychological Science! While we failed to replicate some of the key findings, we did find evidence of intergroup moral hypocrisy in both studies. Specifically. we found that political groups were less forgiving of the exact same moral transgression when it was committed by an outgroup member compared to an ingroup member. This paper was written by Claire Robertson, Madison Ackles, & Jay Van Bavel. You can read the preprint of the paper here.

We updated our preprint on using GPT for text analysis (e.g., analyzing concepts like emotions, sentiment, and offensiveness). The paper now includes new results from GPT4 Turbo, and incorporates more discussion on GPT’s potential weaknesses and biases. Crucially, we found that GPT-4 Turbo does even better than GPT-4 in detecting psychological constructs via text. The paper was led by Steve Rathje and Dan-Mircea Mirea. You can read our updated preprint here.

Other Announcements

Recently we invited Laura Kriska, an organizational consultant and author of The Business of We, to evaluate our group performance using her Team Machine exercise. This exercise is designed to evaluate team cohesion and foster connections among groups. We had to break into small groups to make a component of a Rube Goldberg machine and then all come together to form the pieces into a single machine. It was a blast to have her and her associate Heather for our lab meeting, and according to her we did fantastic compared to her other groups. In fact, she said we were the fastest and most effective team she’s ever assessed (including leading engineering firms and executive teams)! Find out more about Laura and her work here.

Jay gave a keynote address  about his book “The Power of Us” at this year’s American Montessori Society conference. He shared research from the lab on the need to have shared goals, collective rewards, healthy social norms and excellent leadership to build healthy and effective groups with over 400 teachers!

If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.

And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:

That’s all for this month, folks- thank you for reading, and we’ll see you next month!