Vladimir Bojarskich

@vbojarskich.bsky.social

PhD candidate - Political & Social Psychology at Uni Jena & KomRex | online hatred | morality & politics | climate change

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

Our new paper analyzes 19 predictors of climate change beliefs & action across 55 countries (N=4635) 4 predictors had consistent effects across all outcomes: 1) environmentalist identity, 2) trust in climate science, 3) internal environmental motivation, 4) the Human Development Index

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Job alert! We are looking for two postdoctoral researchers at the intersection of political psychology, science communication, and survey methodology: -One for my Vidi project on factual belief polarization. -One for my starting grant on the politicization of science. www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Postdoc Position in Political Psychology: Polarisation, Misperceptions, and the Politicisation of Science (two) | Radboud University

Do you want to work as a Postdoc Position in Political Psychology: Polarisation, Misperceptions, and the Politicisation of Science (two) at the Nijmegen School of Management? Check our vacancy!

ru.nl

I wanted to highlight key findings from our study and the replication, and how they extend to 2024. Now it provides a systematic review of more than 600 scientific studies on the relationship between digitalization and democracy. So what does science have to say? We actually know quite a bit: 1/5

A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy - Nature Human Behaviour

This systematic review on digital media and democracy finds beneficial relationships mostly in emerging democracies but detrimental associations in established democracies for different political vari...

nature.com

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen@lorenzspreen.eurosky.social · last yr.

Very glad to see that our study with @lfoswaldo.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social Ralph Hertwig about digital media and democracy was replicated and extended to 2024. Big thanks to the authors and @i4replication.bsky.social. This adds important confidence to our results and worrying trends continue…

How do attitudes become moralized? We find that moral conviction spreads between connected attitudes over time. + Those with highly connected belief systems (ideologues) have highly moralized belief systems! Come see us at the moral psych pre-con poster session @spspnews.bsky.social to learn more😃

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Congratulations to @drmorganalw.bsky.social who made this project a reality (some real heavy lifting!), and thanks to @markrubin.bsky.social for a terrific summary overview!

Mark Rubin@markrubin.bsky.social · 2y ago

"I have a dream..." New work by @drmorganalw.bsky.social, @lindaskitka.bsky.social and colleagues considers how people's imagined utopias and dystopias affect their willingness to engage in social change. Open access: doi.org/10.1111/bjso... Few quotes...

When people think of a utopian future, what do they imagine? We examined (a) whether people's self-generated utopias differ by how much they criticize, seek to change or escape from an undesirable present; and (b) whether these distinct types of utopian thinking predict system-critical attitudes and intentions to change the status quo. Participants (N = 509) wrote about a future where a social issue they supported was resolved (e.g. economic inequality and climate change). Latent profile analysis revealed a subgroup of change-oriented utopian thinkers with lower system satisfaction and higher action intentions than the other two subgroups. Unexpectedly, the remaining profiles imagined ominous (dystopian thinkers) or ‘neutral’ (ambivalent future thinkers) futures and expressed mixed social change support. Computerized linguistic analyses further revealed that dystopian thinkers used more hopelessness-related language than change-oriented utopian thinkers. Ambivalent future thinkers were as ‘hopeless’ as dystopian thinkers but, like change-oriented utopian thinkers, used more fairness-related language. Thus, change-oriented utopian thinkers distinctly imagined a fairer—and possible—future. These results illustrate heterogeneity in how people imagine the future of their societies on specific issues. Critically, the features of these visions predict system-critical attitudes and a willingness to agitate for change.

Does participating in collective action moralize one's attitudes over time, and if so, how? Happy to share that our paper is now out in JPSP! With Martijn van Zomeren, Roberto González, Ernestine Gordijn, Pia Carozzi, Michal Reifen Tagar, Belén Álvarez, Cristián Frigolett, and Eran Halperin. (1/9)

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New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

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Previous research shows that people sometimes view moral questions as objectively true, while other times treating them as true only relative to different perspectives. In our new paper, we present evidence that social rewards may explain this apparent inconsistency...

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This is going around again! Clearly it's time to resurrect this which I made for twitter back when it was less evil. Types of Psych Papers [Note: it is slightly more cynical (for humour value) than I actually am]

Types of psych paper: 1) my honours student needed a publication; 2) I have this enormous dataset that I don't know what to do with but isn't it cool? 3) people on MTurk can sometimes learn things; 4) children are like weird adults; 5) my model does the same thing as previous models but is Bayesian; 6) people make silly decisions; 7) I found random noise in my data and made up a big theory to address it; 8) my research doesn't need math but if I have equations people will think I'm smart; 9) my model doesn't explain things but has nice fits, see? 10) things get weird as soon as you have people in groups; 11) all of cogsci is like undergrads at my university; 12) humans, what the heck?!?

Der Band "Psychologie der Verschwörungstheorien" ist fertig und vor einer Woche erschienen - Hurra! Ich als Herausgeber habe Exemplare, von denen ich drei gerne verschenke. Unter allen Reposts lose ich drei aus (wenn es mehr als drei sind) und schicke Euch das Buch per Post. Nur auf bluesky...

Buchcover "Psychologie der Verschwörungstheorien"