Social Identity & Morality Lab

Liberals & conservatives have different beliefs on climate change. Despite this difference in beliefs, our research finds that they take similar climate actions- driven not by liberals failing to act, but conservatives acting in spite of their belief in climate change! Read more in this month's newsletter: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/bridging-the-climate-change-gap-between

Are people more forgiving of moral transgressions from in-group members? Our replication of a classic moral psych paper found evidence of in-group favoritism in minimal groups and out-group derogation in political groups, but failed to replicate the original study. Read more here: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/DZD88EUMGMTXU4ZEKDKW/full

In our commentary for BBS, we argue that social media companies take advantage of people's tendency to attend to threats, by promoting divisive content on social media to grab people's attention. However, divisive content isn't necessarily what people want to see. Read more here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/changing-the-incentive-structure-of-social-media-may-reduce-online-proxy-failure-and-proliferation-of-negativity/AE45CE8CE0753193325D8C5D698575EB

The political polarization of climate change is a major barrier against effective climate action. In our latest research, we investigate the impact of political ideology on climate change beliefs, actions, and policy support. To read more about it, follow the link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/s41467-024-48112-8?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oa_20240508&utm_content=10.1038%2Fs41467-024-48112-8

How can we change the design of social media to counter misinformation? In our latest research, we add a "Misleading" button to social media posts, to show users how many people in their in-group marked a post as false. Read more about the paper in our newsletter (link: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/the-misleading-count-changing-the?r=nug3n)

🌎 How can we most effectively use psychology to get people to fight climate change? In our latest newsletter, we discuss results of our recent study on climate beliefs and action. Read it below!

What are the most effective messages to increase climate action Our latest research evaluates into the best messages to bolster support for climate action and how we planted over 300,000 trees (plus we share a number of new papers and pre-prints)

There are nearly 5 billion active social media users around the world. But how does social media impact human psychology? We break down our paper on social media and morality in our latest newsletter. Read it here:

Social Media and Morality How do our morals affect the dynamics of social media?

What has our lab been up to in the past year? You can read our Year in Review newsletter on Substack right now to find out! https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/2023-year-in-review

How can the field of neuroscience assist in the fight against climate change? We discuss two distinct pathways to do so and more in our latest newsletter. Read it here:

Can neuroscience contribute to the fight against climate change? Our latest paper makes a case for the utility of "Leveraging Neuroscience for Climate Research”

Social media uses attention and engagement as a proxy for what people want to see on social media, leading to negative and threatening content being promoted by social media algorithms. However, this doesn't align with what social media users themselves want to go viral. In our new commentary, we propose changes that can be made to social media platforms in order to reduce threatening content in the online sphere and align better with users' preferences. Read it here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/bwp2g/

When attempting to predict a realistic outcome, it's said that people will settle between a best & worst case scenario. However, our research suggests that people's realistic and best-case scenarios are indistinguishable. Read it + more in this month's newsletter: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/why-we-mis-predict-the-future-the

Do people judge the same action differently if they're using a hedonic, moral, or pragmatic lens to do so? We find this to be the case in our new paper: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/esby8/

New paper out now! How do people perceive content that goes viral, and what do they think should go viral? We find people generally agree that negative content and misinformation are likely to go viral, but shouldn’t. Instead, they believe positive content should go viral- but doesn’t.

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231190392)

New preprint: moral, pragmatic, and hedonic evaluations of whether something is good or bad rely on similar brain regions, but each type also recruits additional brain areas to make judgements. Read more here: https://psyarxiv.com/esby8/

How closely do people's predictions match reality? In our new paper, we find that people's "realistic" predictions were actually much closer to their best-case scenario compared to their worst-case scenario, across multiple domains. Read it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231191360 -15

System-wide change is necessary for society as a whole to take on today’s most pressing challenges. But how do changes made by individuals play into these efforts? In this commentary, we argue that tying social identity to individual-level solutions may increase support for system-level interventions. Read it on page 48:https://www.jayvanbavel.com/_files/ugd/f317e9_dea478c0040d4ffeba1cb7207a134498.pdf

🔔 This month's newsletter out now! 🔔
How can crowdsourced accuracy judgements affect the spread of misinformation online? We discuss our latest findings and more in our September newsletter (click here to read more: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/crowdsourced-accuracy-judgments-can)

🔔New Paper🔔

We motivated 3000+ US participants to accurately discern true and false political news across 4 experiments. We found that small financial incentives improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in judgements of headlines by about 30%. Read the paper here for more details: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w

via Steve Rathje, Jon Roozenbeek, Jay Van Bavel & Sander van der Linden

🔔New Paper🔔

Our data from 68 countries reveals that people with a strong moral identity, cooperation-oriented morality, and wider moral circles were more likely to engage in public health behaviors and support related policies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13684302231153800

🔔New Paper🔔

Our new paper uncovers motivations behind online misinformation among far-right partisans. We find that identity fusion and sacred values play a key role in misinformation sharing.

Read it here:https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2023-83147-001.pdf

Via Clara Pretus, Camila Servin-Barthet, Elizabeth Harris, William Brady, Oscar Vilarroya, Jay Van Bavel

How to motivate people to share more accurate news?

In our latest newsletter, we discussed several new papers and findings about misinformation and more.

Read it here: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/how-to-motivate-people-to-share-more

🔔New Preprint🔔

Our new working paper explores the use of GPT, the language model behind ChatGPT, for automated psychological text analysis in multiple languages. Read it here: https://psyarxiv.com/sekf5/

via Steve Rathje, Dan-Mircea Mirea, Ilia Sucholutsky, Raja Marjieh, Claire Robertson & Jay Van Bavel

How can political and nonpolitical belief change elicit behavioral change?

We discussed this question in our recent lab newsletter featuring our award-winning paper and many other new studies.

Read the newsletter here to learn more:

Address Societal Challenges with Behavioral Change Strategies Our new papers on why behavioral change strategies are a critical component in addressing societal challenges, ChatGPT, misinformation, psychology in Pandemic and more.

How can we solve big problems we face as a society?

In our recent newsletter, we argued that individual behavioral interventions that harness people’s social identities may be particularly beneficial for achieving system-level change.

Read it here: https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/individual-level-solutions-can-support

Recently, Prof. Jay Van Bavel gave a series of presentation on the lessons he learned in during our lab meetings. Part 2 focuses on how to build the essential skills for your research career.

Recording now available on Youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UhsHJ8L9bRg

In our recent lab meetings, Prof. Jay Van Bavel gave a series of presentation on the lessons he learned in .

Part 1 focuses on how to take care of yourself and how to build the big picture for your research career.

Recording now available on Youtube:

Jay Van Bavel: Lessons I learned in Grad School (Part 1/3) In this series of presentation, Prof. Jay Van Bavel shares the lessons he learned in graduate school. In it, he outlines the mistakes he made in school (as w...

How and why does political devotion affect sharing?

Read our newsletter this month on this and many other new studies in the lab:

Political devotion drives misinformation sharing Why extreme partisans spread misinformation sharing and resistance to fact-checking

Check out this write up in of our new paper on negativity and online news consumption:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/negativity-bias-online-news-consumption/673499/

🔔New Paper🔔

Can changing lead to behavioral change? Our new study shows that the answer is yes for nonpolitical issues but more complicated for political related topics. Read here:https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6216d7edf814e51673d8962f/t/64166a78fb51c6694bd37113/1679190649345/2023-53266-001.pdf

Via MadalinaVlasceanu, CaseyMcMahon, JayVanBavel & AlinComan