Partisans have inaccurate perceptions of their political opponents. But a 10 min conversation with a "outgroup" chatbot can correct these erroneous beliefs & reduce partisan hostility Synthetic contact with outgroups can improve our perceptions and reduce intergroup bias arxiv.org/pdf/2607.02181

New research from @yqpan.bsky.social @stephanieherrera.bsky.social @yifeiw1.bsky.social examines how AI is portrayed in the U.S. news from an integrated threat theoretical perspective, identifying 5 major topics surrounding AI-threat coverage. Read more here: doi.org/10.1080/0883... #AI #commsky

Communicating risk helps people make informed decisions. But what happens when risk perceptions are elevated over time? With students Tammy Teo and Cameron Tan, @ismaharif.bsky.social found that increasing perceived risk predict later declines in well-being. Read more here: doi.org/10.1111/aphw...

Most of the statistical tests you learned in stats class — t-test, ANOVA, correlation — are actually special cases of a single thing: linear regression. Ch 7 of Experimentology argues that thinking in models, not tests, is more flexible and a better foundation for theory. 🧵 experimentology.io

Have you seen MATILDA (matilda.fss.uu.nl)? Which stands for Measurement, Analysis & Theory for Intensive Longitudinal Data. MATILDA is a website with educational articles that help researchers align theory, measurement, and analysis when studying processes using intensive longitudinal data.

It’s a wrap! We’re closing out the academic year with our final lab meeting for the quarter with @stephanieherrera.bsky.social presenting her MA thesis research work for the Summer. Next up: finals, grading, and a well-earned Summer break! 🌴🧉✈️

Honored to receive the Putnam Interdisciplinary Scholar Award from the department for the work I do! I’m grateful to my mentors, colleagues and friends who have supported and challenged me along my career to be both social psychologist and communication scientist! 🎉 #commsky #ucsb #nusingapore

Media MOSAIC Lab@mediamosaiclab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We’re excited to share that our lab member @ismaharif.bsky.social has received the Putnam Interdisciplinary Scholar Award from the UCSB Department of Communication! We're so proud to see his interdisciplinary research intersecting communication and psychology recognized through this award! 🎉🤝

Excited for #ICA26 starting today! Do check out our lab's @yqpan.bsky.social @ismaharif.bsky.social @stephanieherrera.bsky.social work on identity threats, emotions and media framing if you're in town! 💻💬🌍 #ICA2026 #ICA26 #commsky #psych

Media MOSAIC Lab@mediamosaiclab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

📢 #ICA2026 is in a few days! If you’re at Cape Town, check out some of the ongoing work by our lab members @yqpan.bsky.social @ismaharif.bsky.social @stephanieherrera.bsky.social Details of our upcoming talks are in the comments [1/4] #commsky #ucsb

ManyBabies ManyBirds ManyDogs It sounds like scientists are assembling an army of cuteness.

Mike Frank@mcxfrank.bsky.social · 2mo ago

@manybabies.org in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New pub by my grad student, @gnihill.bsky.social. This is her first first-author publication! In this work, she has extended our lab's prior work on how confrontations to prejudice on social media can meaningfully shape perceptions. spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

SPSSI Journals

Online confrontations to prejudice can meaningfully shape experiences of racism online for minoritized individuals. We investigate whether confrontation can also operate as an identity safety cue (IS...

spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Identity Map 2.0 is now live. 🎉 Map your identities, visualize how they overlap, and get a personalized complexity score. The new version also measures how much your political identity influences the rest of your worldview, helping reveal potential biases you may not have noticed.

The Groups You Belong to Are Shaping What You Believe. Here's How to See It.

My free Identity Map tool is updated: see how your social groups could make you vulnerable to believing misinformation.

matthewfacciani.substack.com

Our new pub is out! We argue that any future scholarship on the politics of inequality should center the people. We call this the PUBLIC framework (Pluralistic methods, UnBiased perspectives, Local dynamics, Intersectional understanding, & Critical of power). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

Our newest paper presents a novel and accessible approach using LLMS to analyze texts for positive (national identification, patriotism) & defensive (nationalism, national narcissism) national identities We tested 13 million words from social media, surveys, and political speeches in 25 languages.

As already mentioned, I'm re-vampiong my youtube channel. Just dropped the first few R videos. I'll be doing SPSS and R throughout the rest of the year if all goes to plan. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Discover Statistics Using R and RStudio - YouTube

Tutorials showing how to fit statistical models using R. Accompanies my book Discovering Statistics Using R and RStudio: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/dis...

youtube.com

📢 When do social media users participate politically online? In a study led by @yqpan.bsky.social, social media social capital played a key role, amplifying engagement but also reflecting gender differences in digital participation. Read more here! doi.org/10.1080/1520... #commsky

I spent the past semester building interactive teaching apps with AI-assisted coding. I used my personal website to share them with my students, but that makes them hard to find for other educators. So I built Galvoro — galvoro.app

Do check out @nibasaleem.bsky.social talk tomorrow if you're attending PRIEC at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social! 📅 May 8 | 1:30–2:50 PM (PT) 📍 HSSB 6020, UC Santa Barbara

Media MOSAIC Lab@mediamosaiclab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Join us next week at the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium (PRIEC) this year for an upcoming talk by @nibasaleem.bsky.social on how media representations shape intergroup relations and migration! 📅 May 8 | 1:30–2:50 PM (PT) 📍 HSSB 6020, UC Santa Barbara

New paper— everyone is collecting intensive longitudinal data but recent review studies report that less than half of studies consider measurement/psychometrics. The paper covers a few foundational psychometric methods for ILD and provides a shiny app to apply them link.springer.com/article/10.3...

A primer on intensive longitudinal psychometrics - Behavior Research Methods

Many intensive longitudinal studies are interested in topics that are not always amenable to direct physical measurement and instead are often theorized as latent constructs (e.g., affect, emotion, mo...

link.springer.com

📢 New research with @stephtorrespantoja.bsky.social , Julian Unkel, Lisa Rhee, @nibasaleem.bsky.social, and @joebayer.bsky.social What counts as “social media”? We find major disagreement across platforms and age groups, with implications for how people perceive its effects and role in society.

It takes a village to produce research with impact. This is the idea that motivated us to write this paper, published today.  Kudos to the team: @lluisdanus.bsky.social @william-dinneen.bsky.social @carotorreblanca.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social @asc.upenn.edu www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Climate change impacts are here, but public support for action remains polarized. Which climate messages move people? In a ~13,500-person megastudy, we tested 10 of the most-cited messages. Six increased pro-environmental attitudes in the U.S.—but only by 1–4 percentage points. 🧵

New preprint w/ @fearbrain.bsky.social, Bo Zhang, @aanixel.bsky.social & @pandascholar.bsky.social where we examine online political debates to understand how interactions become hostile using data from Reddit, real-time online chat experiments & brain imaging during chats - osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Missed @nibasaleem.bsky.social talk at the International Society for Research on Aggression Speaker Series this year? You can now watch it online here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Yf... #commsky #ucsb

2026 ISRA Seapker Series - Dr. Muniba Saleem

YouTube video by ISRA Society

youtube.com

🚨New Working Paper!🚨 How do Americans mentally map political coalitions? We often talk as if U.S. politics is just two sorted camps. But when people think about which groups go with which, the picture is more complicated. 🧵👇

🚨New WP: Can an AI voter guide (grounded in information from a nonpartisan, fact-checked source) help voters’ decision making? 🚨 We built and evaluated an LLM-based chatbot that provided voting info in CA & TX (N=2,474) right before the 2024 election. 🧵👇

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

Last day of #SANS2026! Today, @rachaelkee.bsky.social will present her poster introducing Inoxity. It’s an open source iOS app that allows for high-throughput collection of EMA and bio-behavioral data. What can you do with high-throughput data? Check her preprint! doi.org/10.33767/osf...

We’re excited to share that @nibasaleem.bsky.social was featured by @spspnews.bsky.social for her research informing policy at federal, social media platform and nonprofit levels! 🏛️💻💬 Read more here: spsp.org/news/newslet... #spsp #commsky #psychsky

New in HCR: Zhu et al. (2026) find that larger choice sets increased overall and cross-cutting news selection. Choice set composition shaped cross-cutting exposure, but attitudes and behavioral intentions did not significantly change in the short term. Read: doi.org/10.1093/hcr/...

The power of context: how choice set size and composition influence overall and cross-cutting news exposure

Abstract. In times of diverse media choices, the context in which choices are made can influence news exposure and opinion change. Inspired by the marketin

doi.org