iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Well, well, well. Looks like someone is about to start reaping

Statement on respect for human dignity and opposition to discrimination
(19-08-2026) Over the past few days, Ghent University has received many enquiries following the death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday and the public reactions to it.

We are aware of the questions and concerns surrounding this matter and understand that it has affected many people. We wish to clarify how the university is handling this situation. First and foremost, Ghent University is shocked by the death of Professor Arday. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, colleagues and students. His death has also hit our own academic community hard.

At the same time, we wish to be clear about the values we uphold as a university. Ghent University stands for respect for human dignity and opposes discrimination, hatred and racism. We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework. We do not wish to pre-empt any potential decisions at this stage, in order to maintain objectivity. It is important to be transparent, whilst also respecting the confidentiality inherent in a personnel file.

The death of Professor Arday should prompt reflection. We hope that lessons will be learnt from what has happened regarding the way we treat one another both within and outside the academic world, particularly when people become the subject of public controversy.

Petra De Sutter, Rector
Herwig Reynaert, Vice-Rector

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

If you think you were a token in academia, just wait until you figure out why you are on the anti-woke beat at The Atlantic.

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Sociologists for Palestine @soc4pal.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Check out the full program of our alternative conference with over 60 sessions (!) in NYC next month. Register today! Program: tinyurl.com/ResistSoc2026 Registration: tinyurl.com/ResistSoc #BoycottASA

White letters on a red background state the following message: Resisting Authoritarianism: Global Solidarity and Democratic Futures. A Conference for Sociologists.
Conference Program, August 10-11, 2026, CUNY Graduate Center, 364 Fifth Ave - New York City.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

As a writer I try to remember that the fact that something annoys me personally does not necessarily make that thing important enough to write about

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Today is the only day you can experience Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” on the day it is set. Audio: archive.org/details/brad... PDF: thephilosopher.net/bredberi/wp-...

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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I am currently working on a major addition to help researchers share data and code in a FAIR and reproducible manner. It's an incredibly exciting project that I strongly believe has immense potential.

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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

#AcademicSky #SocialPsychology peers, know of a URL for good video demonstration of Sherif's autokinetic effect?

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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #SocialPsychology In 2022 book Pillars of Social Psychology, Miles Hewstone contributed Title? "Meetings with Remarkable Men: A Fortunate Journey in Social Psychology" Also: praises Tajfel (ahem). No mention of Tajfel's treatment of women.

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Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

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Adam Grant @adamgrant.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

#PsychSciSky #SocialPsychology #PrejudiceResearch Help me out with stereotype threat I feel that some of field has moved on, saying it's not real But multiple meta-analyses show effects. & there's failed replications but not that many? What's the state of our literature on #StereotypeThreat?

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Ben Saunders @bensaun.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

On digital distractions: I’ve tried to increase engagement by using this rubric, and it helps. But what are faculty doing to encourage real note-taking on laptops or via paper-&-pencil, or discourage laptop use altogether? #AcademicSky #AcademicChatter #PsychSky

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Ben Saunders @bensaun.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Any great policies or best practices for curbing digital distractions? I don’t want to say ‘no laptops,’ but the pseudo note-taking in particular is killing me. #AcademicSky #PsychSky

nytimes.com

Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say

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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Exciting new addition to the AsPredicted and ResearchBox research infrastructure toolbox: AsCollected ascollected.org A platform to document results provenance - where did data come from, who collected it, and who cleaned and analyzed it. So important!

ascollected.org

Home | AsCollected

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

when i wrote about these folks being segregationists, i was told it was a stretch if anything, i undersold their venality

nytimes.com

Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 13/10/2025

Make an effect size prediction! @jamiecummins.bsky.social and I are replicating Balcetis & Dunning's (2010) "chocolate is more desirable than poop" (Cohen's d = 4.52) Let us known in the replies what effect size you think we'll find. Details of the study in the thread below.

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Adrienne Wood @adriennewood.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Over 400 faculty and staff from the #uva College of Arts and Sciences convened for an emergency vote. 97% of eligible voters endorsed a resolution demanding President Mahoney refuse to consider the Trump admin's Compact for Academic Freedom!!

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Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism. 🧵

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nanaslugdiva @nanaslugdiva.blacksky.app · 09/10/2025

They do not realize this at all or refuse to acknowledge it.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

There are reasons for what’s going on with this administration and the military

The Unequal Effects of Unequal Contact:
Power, Race, and Social Cohesion in the U.S. Military
Salma Mousa*
Eddie Yangt
May 21, 2025
Abstract
The contact hypothesis posits that cooperative, equal contact reduces prejudice.
Yet in practice, contact is often unequal — both within the contact setting itself, or because of inherent power imbalances between minority and majority groups. Leveraging rich data from surveys, censuses, and testimonials among servicemembers in WWII and the Vietnam War, we develop and test a theory of unequal contact. For minori-ties, we find that equal contact improves intergroup attitudes, while unequal contact between soldiers and lieutenants sparks backlash effects. For majorities, we find mixed effects: White soldiers respond to equal contact with more support for military integration but less support for Black rights, suggesting that equality may trigger feelings of threat. We add qualitative nuance to these results by digitizing thousands of veteran testimonies from both wars, revealing drastic asymmetric in how White vs. non-White veterans describe their experiences with race within and outside the military. Our results underscore the importance of internal and external power status in determining the effects of contact.

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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch New study: labels used for immigrants matter. ✳️ Quick to associate with "illegal" (vs. "authorized). ✳️ Positive (vs negative) labels ==> more favourable attitudes www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Labeling immigrants: Examining the effects of labels on associations toward immigrants

Immigrants in the United States are often described in the media using a variety of labels (e.g., illegal, authorized). While these labels are connect…

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Jelani Ince @profince.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

I am glad to see this article in print! Here, we build a bridge between institutional theory and the theory of racialized organizations to draw attention to how social interactions provide a dynamic view of racialization in and by organizations. Check it out: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Gift article because I encourage everyone to read this account of SEAL Team 6 murdering a group of North Korean fishermen in a failed espionage mission that was hidden from Congress.

nytimes.com

How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart

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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

10 years ago?! Holy smokes.

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Bex is WEAK on crime @bextraordinary.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

*monkey-like shrieking* I CANNOT. The PROGRESS we've made in finally getting cash bail removed from the criminal justice systems in some places, only to have---- I'mma shut up before I end up on a list but UGH. Cash. Bail. Makes. No. Sense. And. Is. Unfair. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

theguardian.com

Trump signs executive order to eliminate cashless bail in Washington

Move is an escalation in president’s efforts to take control of law enforcement in the capital city and beyond

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Michael W. Kraus @mwkraus.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

I wrote a short companion piece to our new paper about personal responsibility narratives, how pervasive they are, and how important psychology can be as a discipline in helping people reject narratives that people get what they deserve. go.nature.com/4fOeWNn

go.nature.com

The Problem of Personal Responsibility Narratives

Narratives of personal responsibility abound even with research studies. And though these narratives can promote striving and effort, they often obscure and legitimize inequality. Here, I discuss our ...

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Brennan Center @brennancenter.org · 23/08/2025

Two troubling new studies find that lies about the 2020 election tapped into racist attitudes and white America’s long-standing fear of a real multiracial democracy. Read about the studies here: bit.ly/3Jqxp6A

brennancenter.org

The Racist Foundation of the Big Lie of a Stolen Election

New research shows how racist beliefs enable lies about voter fraud to spread.

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Clint Smith @clintsmithiii.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

I debated writing this. It can feel tempting, upon encountering yet another instance of this administration’s racism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet we have to write it down, if for nothing else, so those who come after us know we were against it.

theatlantic.com

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad

The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.

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David Houston @dmhouston.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Fascinating work by Deven Carlson, @t-h-a-d.bsky.social, James Carter, @rachelmarisa.bsky.social, Vitali Radsky, and Andrew McEachin on both the potential of school choice for the purpose of desegregation and the disappointing reality that most school choice systems tend to exacerbate segregation

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

I love how accurately describing actually existing conservatism makes one sound totally unhinged and the people who get punished for this are not conservatives but the accurate describers.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

As a friend once told me, the past few years of punditry can be summarized as college educated white pundits telling college educated black pundits that they know more about working class black people than them

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Vibe policy Vibe evidence Vibe data Vibe economics Vibe "journalism"

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Craig Neumann @cosmiccragg.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Malevolence of modern conservatism nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

#PrejudiceResearch #SocialPsychology #PsychSciSky Large meta-analysis finds global #sexism is declining over time. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... (hmm, wonder if this will reverse soon, given, you know, modern in 2025?)

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Norbert Schwarz @nschwarz.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Statistical critique of the p-curve (in JASA) #psychscisky #socialpsych #cogpsych

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Just re-upping this, because allegedly non-opinion news reporting like this helps power things like Trump deploying ICE to the National Mall. Of COURSE people think crime is always up if articles on epic DECLINES race to make it clear you should "STiLl bE ScAReD!" w confusing frames.

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 25/07/2025

the most important part of this story is not that US diplomats asked if nonwhites qualify for Trump's South Africa refugee program but that Spencer Chretien--a high ranking appointee in Trump's State Department and former Associate Director of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025--answered NO

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

This administration is more openly racist in policy than described by even the most supposedly pessimistic accounts from leading writers predicted but the media remains reluctant to forthrightly describe it as white nationalist.

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Michael W. Kraus @mwkraus.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

"the police dept of the 5th largest city in the country at the time, bombed and destroyed an entire neighborhood... on live television... why did something this big disappear?" "it's the American way...abject ugliness against Black people gets pushed to the margins." www.npr.org/2025/05/07/1...

npr.org

40 years ago, Philadelphia police bombed this Black neighborhood on live TV : Code Switch

We're looking back on the day a Philadelphia police department helicopter dropped a bomb on a rowhouse in a middle-class neighborhood. Even though that bombing and the fire it set off killed eleven pe...

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Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

"Me-Search" New study by @eomeral.bsky.social and colleagues investigates bias against “me-searchers...researchers whose work is directly or indirectly relevant to their own identities or experiences." Open Access: doi.org/10.1177/0146...

“Me-searchers” study topics directly or indirectly relevant to themselves—such as social groups they belong to—and are often stigmatized as being more biased (though sometimes more informed) than those researching topics unrelated to their own experience. This study explores how queer and straight researchers are perceived when studying anti-queer bias or other topics through three pre-registered experiments (N = 823). When both studied anti-queer bias, the queer me-searcher was perceived as more biased, and the straight researcher was perceived as less informed than identical (straight and queer) researchers studying a different topic. Target researchers motivated by social justice (vs. theoretical) implications were also perceived as more biased. Crucially, we identified and tested three conceptual accounts about why and how me-searchers are stigmatized. Supporting the existence of me-search stigma, our results suggest that not only me-searchers but also allied researchers are stereotyped when studying prejudice and discrimination."

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

In the modern era, even “riots” generate support, not backlash www.cambridge.org/core/service...

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Edward Elgar Publishing @elgarpublishing.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

🧠 Out now: Handbook of Experimental Social Psychology, edited by Chadly Stern FREE content: doi.org/10.4337/9781... More information: www.e-elgar.com/shop/isbn/97... 🔔 Mentioned in www.choice360.org/choice-pick/... @choicereviews.bsky.social #Psychology #PoliticalScience #SocialPsychology

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Ben Saunders @bensaun.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

That the The Handbook of Social Psychology is open-access and free-&-accessible to everyone might change the way I teach Social at every level. Organize content around these entries and add supplemental ones as needed. #SocialPsychology #AcademicSky openpublishing.princeton.edu/projects/the...

openpublishing.princeton.edu

The Handbook of Social Psychology | Open Publishing

<p style=

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Ben Saunders @bensaun.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Tragic news. I didn’t know Sam well, but in a brief exchange I had with him about applying to graduate school (~25 years ago) he was more encouraging than just about anyone.

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