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 · 5d 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 · 2w 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...

"norms failed bc humans couldn't predict AI's behavior" aka you can't cooperate with nonsentience. It's always nice to have proof of something everybody should already know!

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 7d ago

Cooperation is one of humanity’s superpowers Our research finds that people don’t simply refuse to cooperate with AI. Instead, the social norms that ordinarily guide cooperation lose their power We explains why social norms fail in human-AI interaction www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/why-social...

Cooperation is one of humanity’s superpowers Our research finds that people don’t simply refuse to cooperate with AI. Instead, the social norms that ordinarily guide cooperation lose their power We explains why social norms fail in human-AI interaction www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/why-social...

I was on @npr.org this week to talk about the science of social identity, intergroup conflict, and social norms. I did an interview on Hidden Brain about my book: www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/grou... They invited me to return to answer listeners’ Qs (54 mins in): www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-...

Group Think - Hidden Brain Media

How do the groups you identify with shape your sense of self? Do they influence the beer you buy? The way you vote? In this favorite episode from 2021, psychologist Jay Van Bavel explains how our grou...

hiddenbrain.org

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

“Research is essential to the task of humanistic formation, even at a teaching-focused college… a prime opportunity to promote the virtues academics are best positioned to model for students: curiosity, persistence, devotion to the truth, and humility in the face of everything we do not know”

Opinion | The False Choice That Could Kill the Humanities

The tension between teaching and scholarship is not as acute as critics pretend.

chronicle.com

There is no political downside to opposing authoritarianism. (cc Yale).

YouGov America@today.yougov.com · last wk.

NEW Economist/YouGov Jul 25-27 72% of Independents strongly or somewhat disapprove of Trump's job performance, and only 19% approve — a net approval of -53, his lowest ever At this point in Trump's first term, his net approval among Independents was -5 d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...

I did an interview with the @nytimes about a new viral trend: Travel accounts of risky global journeys These feel more accessible to people than the “Kardashian knockoff influencers” famous on Instagram in the 2010s which helps people develop a deeper connection. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/t...

Is Instagram’s Latest Travel Trend a Disaster Waiting to Happen? (Gift Article)

Travel accounts that feature risky, cross-continental journeys are proliferating on social media. Security experts have serious concerns.

nytimes.com

Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries (and 97,220 citizens) They find that a communitarian approach, where societies foster environments that care for others, is highly effective at boosting a nation’s overall happiness. www.psypost.org/scientists-i...,

Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries

What makes a society truly happy? New research in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that supportive, inclusive environments boost national well-being significantly more than individualistic ...

psypost.org

Failure to act on bullying and persistent negativity is a leading reason why employees leave an organization—more significant than salaries or wages. A study from MIT Sloan found “toxic corporate culture” to be 10.4 times more important than compensation in an employee’s decision to resign.

I'll be speaking about our research on "How AI can both entrench and overcome our biases" at the Academic of Management Annual Meeting on August 4th in Philly. If you are at AOM and want to meet in person email me.

There's an inside baseball misinformation studies point I want to make here about enduring five years of the political science and sociology folks saying: "people online don't really believe this stuff, this is all just downstream expression" and what an obvious crock that was.

Jonathan V. Last@jvl.bsky.social · 2w ago

Worst part of the new @status.news report is that the Bari Weiss team appears to get its view of what is actually happening in the world from Twitter. They were asking Vega to include things that *weren't real* b/c they didn't know any better. www.status.news/p/cecilia-ve...

This is another step towards a one-party state: only give government grants to your political friends www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b...

Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him (Gift Article)

Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election.

nytimes.com

Can reading non-fiction books reduce partisan hostility? We tested 25 books using simulations and the winners are: “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness” + “Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation”. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/can-ai-hel...

Can AI Help Us Find the Books That Bridge Political Divides?

We used language models to screen 26 nonfiction books. They agreed on the broad winners, disagreed on the details, and helped us choose two finalists for a human trial.

powerofusnewsletter.com

People are moral hypocrites The tendency for people to consider themselves morally good while behaving selfishly is known as moral hypocrisy We found that people engaging in moral hypocrisy with regard to their own behavior as well as the groups the belong to journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Denying gender discrimination is linked to higher well-being among women because denying gender discrimination promotes the view that the system is fair The "denial of discrimination is an individual-level coping mechanism" that perpetuates gender inequality onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators, particularly sex offenders, display in response to being held accountable for their behavior The perpetrator Denies the behavior, Attacks the individual doing the confronting & Reverse the roles of Victim/Offender such that the perpetrator becames the victim

🚨 Deadly anti-science & antivaxx BS now mostly about politics. Antivaccine legislation is rising rapidly in US states, driven primarily by GOP push medicalxpress.com/news/2026-07... From study: "86% of antivaccine bills sponsored by lawmakers affiliated with the Republican Party." Dark Age 2.0.

Antivaccine legislation is rising rapidly in US states, driven primarily by GOP push

Despite overwhelming evidence of the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine hesitancy intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and has fueled skepticism toward other lifesaving vaccines for...

medicalxpress.com