Health outcomes in the USA are polarized Declining trust in medical experts among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness is leaving them vulnerable to preventable health risks. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A hyperactive minority of highly polarized users contribute to community notes As social platforms now rely on community notes Rather than decentralizing epistemic authority, community-based fact-checking places power in the hands of a small, polarized group of contributors. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08970

COS is announcing important changes to the Open Science Framework (OSF). OSF Projects—used for project collaboration, file mgmt, & storage—is being phased out as an active workspace over the next 6 months. This change does not affect persistence & accessibility of existing public projects. (🧵1/2)

New pub, led by Aymin Triki & in collab w/ @abbycassario.bsky.social, accepted at JESP! We found similarities in party cues among the left and the right when using representative samples of issues, although right-wing authoritarians may be an exception Other interesting findings follow!

Researchers with greater scientific impact are less happy. The reason is that they suffer from worse work-life balance. All work and no play, makes academics miserable. But...scholars who have prosocial goals and creative engagement are happy. The key is tenure. academic.oup.com/rev/article/...

Exposure to a single dissenter—even when that dissenter is wrong—breaks conformity. It frees other group members to think independently and voice their own perspectives. This is why it's to create a culture where construtive dissent is valued, rather than suppressed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7GK...

New Mexico court orders Instagram & Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms "it sends an unmistakable message that companies will be held accountable when their product designs knowingly put children at risk" www.npr.org/2026/08/07/n...

Court orders Instagram and Facebook's Meta to pay $567M to address kids' mental health online

Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money will be used for treatment services for young people.

npr.org

New study shows that — contra widely accepted narratives — there is NO EVIDENCE that professors change their students’ politics and make them more liberal through their teaching

I'm exciting that Remi is now a Professor! Follow him to learn more about his exciting work on human prosociality. He opened my mind about the power of contemplative practices He also spends a lot of time improving the culture of science, from creating open science tools to supporting others

Rémi Thériault@remi-theriault.com · 4d ago

I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at UQAR in Québec, Canada. This has been a dream 15 years in the making, and I’m SO excited for this new chapter. So grateful to @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and his lab for the most amazing postdoc experience in NYC I could have wished for.

Listening is a dyadic process associated with better job performance, leadership, quality of relationships, trust, job knowledge, job attitudes, and well-being. Listening yields clarity, novel plans, and strengthens attachment to the conversation partner. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

I was inspired by this story of a PhD student who retracted her paper because she found a critical coding error. This is the right thing to do, but it takes courage. She won the Ctrl Z Award celebrating scientists who discover errors and correct the record. www.science.org/content/arti...

ScienceAdviser Exclusive: Meet the inaugural winners of the Ctrl Z Award

Today in Science and science: Ice age hunters’ penchant for female mammoths, a detailed vagal map, and more

science.org

The beginning of the new academic year is near. My inbox today:

Emails Spirited Away: No-Face Overwhelmed

Alt: Emails Spirited Away: No-Face Overwhelmed

static.klipy.com

Platforms don't just distribute politics — they shape our politicians, selected by the price signal and then trained by it. Social media doesn't just polarize users. It defines what wins — and Trump is what X's attention economy rewards. arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220

The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics

Empirical research on social media and politics has primarily treated platforms as distributive systems that expose users to particular messages. The mediatization literature, however, suggests shifti...

arxiv.org

😡 X reposts price antagonism: insult, identity attack and toxicity up; respect, nuance, reasoning and personal narrative down. 🧊 Bluesky reposts favour a cooler register — neutral, less emotional, less personal. 🧐 Mastodon boosts reward reasoning, nuance, compassion, collective language.

Killing off the Social and Behavioral Sciences directorate for this…

Why does everyone seem so mean lately? I joined @oprah to talk about the rise of incivility. The main lesson: humans haven’t suddenly become worse. But the social environment has. The good news: we can change the norms. I listed the key lessons here: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/restoring-...

Restoring Civility in a Mean World: Lessons from our Interview with Oprah

Jay and Oprah discuss why incivility spreads—and how bystanders, leaders, and coworkers can stop it.

powerofusnewsletter.com

Relationship advice on Reddit is increasingly focused on telling people to break up or divorce and ignoring the need to compromise and communicate. Is it just me or does this seem like a recipe for lonliness.

What book has been life changing for you? For many people, a non-fiction book has changed their life. At least, according to countless book reviews. This is why we are now studying the power of non-fiction books to try and make a world a bit less hostile www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/can-ai-hel...

What are the most effective strategies for gaining social status? Why does living around people from the opposite political party affect well-being? Can AI inherit the biases of the societies that build it? Our top 10 new findings from social psych: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/research-r...

Research Roundup: Our 10 favorite new findings from social psychology

Studies on state media control, Republican mental health, increasing social status, online dating and more

powerofusnewsletter.com

Research reveals a negative impact of social media on academic performance Early social media use among teens has a negative effect on competence scores in both Italian & math. The earlier the social media account was created, the more pronounced the negative effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Teenagers are spending as much time on social media as they would for a full-time job. Girls are spending 35+ hours a week on social media and boys are close behind. If they keep it up, the average teen will spend more than 10 years of their life doomscrolling www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

Engagement with right-wing influencers has plummeted in the last year. We have found that outgroup animosity is the single most powerful tool for spreading political content. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... But outrage is much harder when your own side is in charge. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/u...

Call it 'global warming', 'global heating' or 'global boiling': it make not one iota of difference to the impact of the message, it seems!

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 2y ago

Climate change terminology does not influence willingness to take climate action Our new paper (N=6,132, across 63 countries) suggests that focusing on subtle terminology in climate messaging is not an effective use of resources. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @kimdoell.bsky.social

For generations, students chose colleges based on factors like their academic reputation, tuition costs or social scene. But in today’s divided nation, politics has emerged as a rising influence on where young people pursue higher learning.

For college students, a school’s state politics can matter as much as its academics

Students are looking beyond the usual admissions rankings and tuition prices to consider whether a campus — and the state its in — reflects the rights and values they need to feel safe.

19thnews.org

There it is: The internet in a nutshell. John Hodgman in an interview with @andy.baio.net years ago called this the "toxic Internet art of constant callous one upsmanship" waxy.org/2009/02/john... which i found delightfully precise back then. Now confirmed, took a while.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 2w ago

An analysis of 2 billion Reddit comments finds that online dialogue becomes more negative over time Negativity increases because users try to stand out from others, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments (rather than through agreement) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

People use jargon to signal group membership-they also use it to compensate for low status. Nine studies found that being put in a position of low status increases jargon use. An analyses of 64,000 dissertations found that authors from low-status schools use more jargon: gwern.net/doc/psycholo...

An analysis of 2 billion Reddit comments finds that online dialogue becomes more negative over time Negativity increases because users try to stand out from others, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments (rather than through agreement) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“We can’t comment on personnel matters” is often institution-speak for “we’d rather protect our reputation than show you how we handled this.” Adjudicated harassment cases should be given sunlight, not hidden or silenced.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3w ago

You are right: when we hide these outcomes it is concealment, not punishment. My philosophy is that the sexual harassment reports should be made public so the community can read them and draw their own conclusions. This would both exonerate innocent people and hold guilty parties accountable.

LLMs can accurately predict the results of social science experiments Across 70 preregistered studies, there was a very strong correlation (r=.85) between LLM-predicted results and observed effects in actual experiments. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

State media control influences large language models LLMs exhibit a stronger pro-government valence in the languages of countries with lower media freedom than in those with higher media freedom. States have strategic incentives to shape LLM output. www.nature.com/articles/s41...