New post (link in comments):

The Words Can Harm Scale was recently covered in The Wall Street Journal - check it out below! www.wsj.com/opinion/free...

Opinion | The Empathy of the Intolerant

A new paper suggests that the most empathetic among us are also the most intolerant of free speech.

wsj.com

We gave 30 couples without kids an infant simulator for the weekend and tracked how they handled it. Nope, this isn't a reality show: it's a scientific paper! 🍼 New in Human Nature 👇🔗

psych post-bacc jobs are scattered across wikis, twitter/bsky, and random lab sites. hard to find if you're not already in the field. I started a slack to pool them in one place — a low-effort bulletin board, channels by subfield, updated live! 🔗⬇️

Excited to share that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Feeling very grateful for my amazing mentors and collaborators.

Thrilled to share I'll be starting a PhD in Psychology at Yale this fall with Melissa Ferguson — and that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support my work! Can't wait to get started! 🥳 #NSFGRFP

I'm working on a post with an online science blog and they replaced all of my em dashes with commas, even where grammatically inappropriate. Is this the new anti-AI signaling?

I started a newsletter and my first post is about the twitter reactions to our new Words Can Harm Scale. Link in comments!

"Studying people’s deeply held beliefs is a funny thing. No matter how unbiased you try to be, you typically end up upsetting people on both sides, because each assumes your agenda is against them. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing the research."

Can Words Harm?

My new measure that sparked Twitter outrage

sampratt.substack.com

Our recent PSPB paper showing that liberals and conservatives have different perceptions of victimhood (AoVs) is generating quite a bit of discussion on r/science. Short summary of the results (and 🔗 ) below 🧵

🚨 New paper in Personality and Individual Differences! We introduce the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS): a 10-item measure of the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm. Who believes that words can harm, and what does this belief predict?🧵 ⬇️

Can words be harmful? A new scale by @sampratt99.bsky.social et al scores the strength of the belief they can. High scorers tend to be younger, female, non-White and liberal, and self-rate as high in intellectual humility, empathy and moral grandstanding: buff.ly/UZu4znx

This past weekend, I attended @ap-ls.org in Reno, Nevada and presented a poster on the co-occurrence of true crime consumption & victim-blaming attitudes. 🧪⚖️ #apls2026

Last month, I presented my poster on how true crime consumption relates to victim blaming at #SPSP2026 in Chicago — and I'm so honored to have received the Best Poster Award at the Moral Psychology pre-conference! 🎉

⚖️ New paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences! Legal decisions hinge on who counts as a victim — but our judgments are biased & hard to change. We propose solutions: victim impact statements, funding restorative justice, & acknowledgments for exonerees.

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

I am crowdsourcing divisive TV episodes for a study on moral disagreement. If you know of episodes that make for heated conversation, please complete the form below and pass it on! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Help Me Find the Ultimate TV Argument

The Goal: I am designing a psychology study about how our brains handle disagreement. I am looking for specific TV episodes that divide viewers into two opinion camps—a story where two reasonable peop...

docs.google.com

Looking for hands-on psychology research experience? We've compiled summer programs, internships, and opportunities specifically for undergraduates. Explore the full guide: https://ow.ly/sWBj50XT9SM

It's that time of year - lots of people are hunting for postbacc research jobs and aren't sure where to start. Below are some helpful resources I compiled from my experience. Please feel free to share with others! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Postbacc Psychology Job and Career Resources.docx

Psychology Resources for Post-Baccalaureate Jobs, Graduate School, and Career Planning Finding a postbaccalaureate research job in psychology can be time-consuming, difficult, and mysterious. This…

docs.google.com

There is def reason to worry about impact of LLMs in science, but one benefit they've already had is eroding the heuristic that complex writing = good writing LLMs can mask a bad idea with elegant writing, which makes complexity a bad signal of quality. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m taking grad level social psych and am noting examples of social/personality psych directly influencing society. Any other favorite examples? -Good Samaritan laws (bystander effect) -Mass marketing/political messaging (Yale Approach) -Personality traits (Allport) -Dating apps (similarity effect)

Pleased to share our paper Sending Signals: Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces is an Editor’s Choice paper in JEP:A 🥳 Trigger warnings and safe spaces are increasingly popular. We asked: do they shape how students perceive the classroom climate? psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Why do some health choices seem like moral issues 💉😷 whereas others are personal preferences 🦷🧘? Our new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that we moralize health behaviors when we see them as causing harm. doi.org/10.1177/0146...

Nobel prizes are out, did anyone else get honorable mention?

New post about the signals that trigger warnings and safe spaces send to students in SPSP blog👇

Introducing the Words Can Harm Scale: a measure of the belief that words can cause psychological harm. Preprint and online assessment in next tweet!

✍️ New Preprint: "Sticks and stones may break my bones..." but can words really harm? We created the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS) to measure the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm. You can take the online assessment here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...

People often rely on their own judgment over the "wisdom of the crowds" when making tough decisions (e.g., "which school should I attend?") A new study found that across 12 countries, most participants went with their gut even when given the option to consult others.

New study finds that as birth rates have declined, we've started spending more on pets. And across several studies, dog lovers often prioritized dogs over people in moral dilemmas 🐶 > 🙍

Helen Devine@helenldevine.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Study 1: National spending on pets is strongly negatively correlated with the birth rate (r = -.93; controlling for GDP). This replicated at the county level. Less babies born = more 💸 spent on pets, which may suggest a caregiving trade-off.

A new study seems to show that right-leaning participants care more about left-leaning causes than right-leaning ones 🤯 A surprising finding, but I think we should be cautious about this interpretation 🧵 1/8