Very excited to share that undergraduate senior and my research mentee, Sophie Verrecchia, has earned the Elon Department of Psychology’s 2026 Research Excellence Award! (1/4)

The first cohort of the Wiezel BORG Lab is graduating (🥲), & I’m excited to start sharing their accomplishments. Alongside shared lab projects, each senior conducted independent research using CloudResearch Connect & presented at Elon’s Spring Undergraduate Research Forum (SURF) on April 28. (1/4)

Very proud of my newest research student, Justice Wilbourn, who will be joining the BORG Lab in Fall 2026. Justice just earned a competitive Sinclair undergraduate research grant to support a project on parental influences on political attitudes (with Dr. Nic Bussberg and me). Congrats, Justice! 👏

Delighted that I got to spend some time in Richmond, VA earlier this week supporting two of my outstanding seniors as they presented their research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). Both projects reflect some of the more independent work they’ve been doing in the BORG Lab.

And that’s a wrap for my #SPSP2026 talk summaries this year. Thanks for sharing all that neat work, y’all! ☺️

@icedteas.bsky.social presented interesting work at #SPSP2026 suggesting that (political) moral conviction seems to have three distinct facets, focused on: inparty moralization, moralized disagreement, and moralized character judgment (for being a member of the outparty).

@diegoreinero.bsky.social presented some thought-provoking work at #SPSP2026 showing that American partisans seem to be most attitudinally polarized on climate issues, in particular.

@jakewomick.bsky.social presented interesting work at #SPSP2026 investigating the prejudices of extreme leftists, finding that they were negatively prejudiced against men and Jewish people; prejudices associated with (and mediated by) perceptions that these groups are harmful and powerful.

In the #SPSP2026 symposium she chaired, @abbycassario.bsky.social presented work investigating how attitudes get pulled into the moral domain; while prior explanations have focused on emotions and intra-attitudinal features, she suggested researchers should also consider *inter*-attitude structures.

In an interesting #SPSP2026 talk, @abdoe.bsky.social presented data showing that assigning participants to watch a debate (versus an informational video, or no video) on rent control made them significantly more intellectually humble.

Interesting research presented by Zarnab Zahoor at #SPSP2026 found that across 9 democracies (7 Christian-majority, 1 Hindu-majority, and 1 Jewish-majority), all samples showed a positive association between religious nationalism and conservatism (this effect was especially pronounced in the U.S.).

In an interesting #SPSP2026 talk, @asmiley.bsky.social presented work suggesting that the proportion of out-partisans at one’s church had a curvilinear association with affective polarization—politically balanced churches showed the lowest rates of affective polarization.

Also at #SPSP2026, Jan Voelkel used data from a mega-study testing the impact of 25 interventions on over 32,000 Americans’ democratic attitudes to show only a small correlation between affective and attitudinal polarization.

And, quick plug for Elon University undergraduate student Dani Rudd’s poster on a theoretical approach to thinking about authenticity in human-AI relations. This is Dani’s first #SPSP2026. She was in my Careers in Psychology class last Fall and is looking at PhD programs and lab manager positions!

Giovanina Kelly presented cool work on the average daily trajectories of activists age 18-24 before, during, & after the 2024 US elections, finding that activism decreased after elections, but was not further moderated by participant race, sex, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. #SPSP2026

Kayley Okst presented a mega-study testing the efficacy of 10 expert-crowdsourced behavioral interventions for increasing voter registration. Although many interventions increased intentions, trust, efficacy, & registration website visits, none actually increased registration or turnout. #SPSP2026

Our #SPSP2026 symposium organizer, Kristina Wald, also presented some interesting work on people’s evaluations of maturity and preferences for maturity in leaders, finding that (1) maturity seems to have two dimensions: socio-emotional (e.g., emotion regulation) and cognitive (e.g., wise judgment).

During our “what do we value in leaders” symposium at #SPSP2026, Danbee Chon presented interesting results suggesting that liberals underestimate the success/electability of dominant leaders, a result that held across organizational & political primary (i.e., same/in-party evaluation) contexts.

A day 2 presentation at #SPSP by @jules-oberschulte.bsky.social suggested that both in pilot studies covering fictitious political scenarios an in the 2024 US elections, participants were less likely to share in-party criticism.

In an interesting Day 2 talk at #SPSP, Michalis Mamakos showed data suggesting that across 250 million comments from over 10,000 subreddits, of those covering political topics, about 13% could be coded as “closed-minded”, but only 3% covering non-political topics could be coded as “closed-minded.”

Day 2 of #SPSP also featured an interesting talk by Jordan Thompson, finding that participants with high levels of outparty animosity were more engaged with online political memes than those with lower levels of outparty animosity, including in terms of the intent to like and share those memes.

During Day 2 of #SPSP, @crobertson500.bsky.social presented interesting work suggesting that although people overwhelmingly think (blue dots) that negative content (seen in red rows) goes viral online, they actually *want* (orange dots) positive content (seen in green rows) to go viral online.

Samuel Arnold presented interesting data at the #SPSP polipsy precon showing that U.S. Prolific participants overestimate past prejudice against Black Americans relative to actual levels of historical prejudice per ANES data; discrepancies increased as participants estimated further back in time.

Another impressive data blitz at the #SPSP political psychology preconference came from @hwaldfogel.bsky.social who investigated how Democrats and Republicans define what “we” means in campaign messaging.

An interesting data blitz by Noah Laskey at the #SPSP political psychology preconference investigated the role of context in the moral foundations, questioning some of the classic work highlighting the differences in moral judgments between liberals and conservatives…

Another interesting #SPSP political psychology preconference data blitz by @trevorslies.bsky.social investigated the association between conservatism and different types of environmentalism—complicating prior work suggesting conservatism might be uniformly related to anti-environmental sentiment.

Another cool data blitz from #SPSP political psych precon. People asume there are two large coalitions in the U.S.: liberals & conservatives. But, work by @isaiasghezae.bsky.social suggests there are instead 3: (1) conservatives, (2) ideological liberals, and (3) a liberal demographic group.

Second, during the #SPSP political psychology data blitzes, Sanaz Talaifar presented some fascinating analyses of smartphone data among German users to investigate the everyday behaviors of people with greater authoritarian tendencies. These behaviors were better than chance at predicting high…

Some particularly impressive data blitzes @ the #SPSP political psych precon. First, Opeyemi Adeojo presented a look at how different facets of tendency toward interpersonal victimhood are associated with support for violence in an active conflict between indigenous groups & the Fulani in Nigeria.

Some interesting talks this morning at the #SPSP political psychology preconference! First up, Beth Anne Helgasom discussed work across five studies (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, and 3) that found that partisans are more lenient in judging the falsehoods said by politicians they support versus oppose, because