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Calvin Lai

@calvinklai.bsky.social
2.5K followers 463 following 94 posts

Social psychologist & professor at Rutgers University. Studying how to reduce prejudice and discrimination. Opinions are my own. he/him calvinklai.com

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Reposted by Calvin Lai
Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
📊 New resource: ISAAC, an open corpus for studying social group attitudes 💬 527M+ Reddit posts (2007–2023) 🧠 Covers race, sexuality, age, ability, and skin tone 🗺️ Validated against Gallup and Google Trends 🔍 No-code or Python/SQL: isaac.psychology.illinois.edu 📖 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.27059
We introduce the Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC), an open, modular, and accessible corpus of 527 million+ English-language Reddit posts selected for relevance to six key social group distinctions based on race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone, covering the 17-year period from 2007 to 2023. A multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline was used to keep irrelevant content in the curated dataset below 10%, both overall and for each social group distinction. Each post was then algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region, along with a suite of validated off-the-shelf and custom semantic labels including moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. We confirm the validity of the resulting corpus through convergent evidence linking ISAAC to macro-level societal trends, such as online search behavior, temporal spikes during major societal events (both nationally and regionally), and long-term shifts in public attitudes. By offering a unified, public infrastructure, ISAAC eliminates research fragmentation and enables seamless replication while supporting diverse empirical workflows at scale. Specifically, ISAAC allows investigators to perform cross-category comparisons, conduct high-precision tracking of long-term temporal shifts in social group discourse, and map spatial variation onto localized public opinion and policy outcomes. ISAAC's fully public, modular pipeline facilitates easy extension of the corpus to new platforms, languages, and social categories. To accommodate various research needs, ISAAC is accessible both without coding through a point-and-click website and labeler web-apps, and programmatically via an SQL playground, a Python package, and HuggingFace.
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 13h
The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).
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Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
New: Chris Rufo & his co-host devoted a podcast to "The Indian Question," framing Desi people as a problem to be solved. Their "solution?" Mass expulsion. For those allowed to remain: an “assimilation hazing process” w/ instances of “vulgar, defamatory racism" talkingpointsmemo.com/news/chris-r...
talkingpointsmemo.com
Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing
To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in...
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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...
AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

    97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).
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Thomas Talhelm @thomastalhelm.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I wrote a little blog post for Springer Nature about my research project that took 20 years! communities.springernature.com/posts/how-a-...
communities.springernature.com
How a misunderstanding knocked 30 years of collectivism research off course
Individualism and collectivism are the most widely studied dimensions of culture. So how did a fundamental mistake
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Amanda J. Wright @ajwright.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Since our paper on the Changing How I Live Life (CHILL) Study is now out in Psychological Science (doi.org/10.1177/0956...), here's a LONG overdue post on the intervention work we've been doing the past few years! Have you ever wanted to change one of your personality traits?
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026
Hey, ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson here. I’m taking over the account to tell you about my new story. For months, I posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to test the company's "responsible gaming" safeguards. Spoiler alert: They made me a VIP — and I lost $10K. Here's how it all went down. 🧵
Selfie taken by ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson, a man wearing a backwards baseball cap and an orange T-shirt.
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David Attewell @davidattewell6.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
1/ Happy to see @kaitlin-alper.bsky.social, myself, & Andreas Jozwiak's paper out @ejprjournal.bsky.social It's well-known that, on average, women support redistribution more than men. We find that the gender gap is conditional on household income & inequality within couples. tinyurl.com/3nrn53ej
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Esther Boissin @boissinesther.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Happy to share a new preprint with @tomcostello.bsky.social, @dgrand.bsky.social and @gordpennycook.bsky.social 🧵 "What beliefs are most debunkable?" osf.io/preprints/ps... We investigate the characteristics of the beliefs that are (or are not) influenced by counterevidence in 3,341 AI dialogues.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/09/2026
i am genuinely bewildered by people who say that the rise of white nationalism in the republican party is a response to the "woke left." like, did the woke left cause pat buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign? is the woke left why steve king had a long career in congress?
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Compared to high-status groups, members of low-status groups often show no implicit ingroup preference In low-status groups, ingroup preferences are accompanied by greater self-control than outgroup preferences (in an analysis of 5.7 million implicit bias tests) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm honored to receive the 2026 Early Career Impact Award from FABBS, nominated by SESP. I'm grateful to all the mentors, collaborators, & lab members who make the work possible.🙏 Check out the spotlight on our research exploring interventions to address discrimination: fabbs.org/news/2026/09...
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Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🚀 Project Implicit’s critical work continues! Our website remains fully operational 24/7, collecting data and launching new studies. We are finalizing a new organizational structure to carry our research and educational mission forward. Thank you to our global community. ➡️ implicit.harvard.edu
September 17, 2026
Project Implicit Continues its Critical Work
We are more excited than ever to not only continue but to expand the scientific collabora-tion at the heart of Project Implicit. With the non-profit that served as our operational home for two decades shutting down, a new organizational structure is being finalized to carry our research and educational mission forward.
In the meantime, the Project Implicit website (http://implicit.harvard.edu/) remains fully operational and continues to collect data 24/7. New studies, programs, and educational ef-forts are actively underway. We expect public data to remain available in perpetuity, and new data from 2026 will be released in January of next year.
We express our deep gratitude to everyone who has helped create, sustain, and grow Pro-ject Implicit. This includes the founders, members of the Board of Directors and the Scien-tific Advisory Board, staff members of the non-profit, international collaborators, and the students across dozens of labs tending to tasks big and small. We are also thankful to our generous donors who have answered our calls and supported our mission, and especially the millions of annual visitors who continue to honor us with their curiosity, time, and data.
We look forward to providing more details in the weeks ahead.
Jordan Axt, McGill University
Yoav Bar-Anan, Tel-Aviv University
Benedek Kurdi, University of Illinois
Calvin Lai, Rutgers University
Ryan Lei, Haverford College
Curtis Phills, University of Oregon
Kate Ratliff, University of Waterloo
Colin Tucker Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University
Jennifer Steele, York University
Heidi Vuletich, University of Denver
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Collaborative science is linked to bigger breakthroughs. Research papers and patents by teams are more highly cited than those produced by solitary individuals. I describe four principles for building inclusive, motivated, and effective teams: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/the-scienc...
powerofusnewsletter.com
The Science of Making Teams Work
Four principles for building inclusive, motivated, and effective teams.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I am sad to share that Project Implicit, my first non-profit and foundation of my career, is closing. The IAT website will continue, managed by the next generation of leaders in implicit bias research. Here's the statement I posted to LinkedIn. It didn't vibe right as a bsky thread.
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/09/2026
The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.
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Sanjay Srivastava @sanjaysrivastava.com · 12/09/2026
Funny enough, if you are a psychologist, your beliefs about personality traits are conditioned by where you went to grad school
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Sander van der Linden @profsanderlinden.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Cool new paper on cognitive inoculation: Does inoculation improve discernment of real-world misinformation headlines? (not just lab items) ✔️Yes! Does misinfo contain more manipulation? ✔️Yes! Side effects: Does it cause undue skepticism or cynicism? ✔️No! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Does protection come at a cost? A random stimuli approach to investigating the (side-)effects of misinformation inoculations
Inoculation – an intervention aimed at informing people of the threat of misinformation and the strategies used to spread it – is an increasingly popu…
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
People judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men. This occurs because rudeness toward men creates the illusion of gender blindness. Men who hold sexist beliefs about women often are rude to men which gives sexists plausible deniability. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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Jin X. Goh | 吴晋勋 @jinxungoh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
🚨 ‼️ new paper ‼️ 🚨 With political scientist Nathan Chan, we used the latest 2024 and 2020 CMPS to look at why Asians and Latinos (the 2 largest immigrant groups in US) might support deportation policies. Out now in Political Psychology! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Working hard to belong: Meritocratic ideology and deportation sentiments among Latino and Asian Americans
Why do some Latino and Asian Americans support conservative policies that may discriminate against them? Elaborating on system justification theory, we argue that ideologies such as meritocracy perpe...
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 09/09/2026
here are some really gorgeous results from the Nock lab on predicting suicide before it's attempted — essential data for suicide prevention
current.fas.harvard.edu
Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
Researcher Matthew Nock pioneered the technique of using smartphone technology to survey high-risk adults and adolescents in real time. In a new study, Nock and his team report using the technology to...
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Incredible story. And another huge example of why tenure protections for academics are important
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Partisans are highly segregated by workplace—the effect is similar in size to gender segregation at work. -Museums and environmental orgs have the fewest Republicans, pipelines and mines have the most Republicans www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/august-res...
powerofusnewsletter.com
August Research Roundup: 10 new findings from social psychology
Studies on social media influencing conformity, workplace segregation, how professors (don’t) influence their student’s ideologies + more
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Incredibly important work surfacing the risks and needs for improving processes for responsible data sharing.
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Wouter Kool @wouterkool.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
🚨 WashU is hiring! 🚨 As part of WashU’s +AI Initiative, the search includes tenure-track opportunities in Psychological & Brain Sciences for people who place AI or machine learning at the center of their research. I'm on the committee, so feel free to reach out with questions. Please repost!
insideartsci.washu.edu
Rules of Life
Recruiting interdisciplinary expertise to explore fundamental questions regarding living systems and the physical world
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simine vazire @simine.com · 02/09/2026
Psych Science has retracted Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002). The second author requested the retraction. Both authors agreed to it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... So grateful to @datacolada.bsky.social for these blog posts and the work behind them: datacolada.org/138 and datacolada.org/139 1/2
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Brittany Cassidy @britcass.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
My department is hiring in social psychology! UNCG is a great place to research and work closely with students. We’re a collaborative bunch across the department 😎
spartantalent.uncg.edu
Assistant Professor of Psychology
The Department of Psychology at UNC Greensboro invites applications for a tenure-track position in Social Psychology (Assistant Professor) to begin August 1, 2027.We seek someone to join an active and...
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Thanks, but actually my favorite line didn't make it to the piece. Does Odysseus feel guilty about the Trojan war? Lots of discourse on this question even though he doesn't exist! Is he conscious? AI agents are fictive characters abstracted from text - like Odysseus.
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SJ Brison @brison.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Love the quote from Alison Gopnik: “We don’t know if toasters are conscious or not,” Dr. Gopnik said. “But no one is asking about that in the pages of The New York Times.”
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
How big is the time tax? The numbers are astonishing. And its a regressive tax. People who need more help from government spend more time in dealign with it. People with more resources can often buy their way out of the time tax. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/annie-lowr...
Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver’s licenses, and applying for government loans. At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year. If Washington were to create a Department of Bureaucracy to take on the paperwork it shunts to citizens, the agency would require 5.9 million employees, making it four times the size of the active-duty military. The DOB’s payroll would be larger than that of every other federal department combined.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Much of my most impactful contributions in research are largely descriptive, without explicitly saying so. Psych Science leading the way in highlighting the value and importance of description.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/08/2026
ordinary people have no idea the system is such a kafkaesque nightmare
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Another new, useful paper on the potential biasing effects of measuring attitudes pre-treatment in survey experiments, this one focused on racial attitudes. Finds no bias from pre-treatment measures in two of three racial attitude measurement strategies www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
*whispers* BLM was popular
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David Levari @davidlevari.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Here is a clunky but decently functional script to make a local copy of all your private and public OSF projects. You'll have to decide where to keep them. Maybe a flash drive under your mattress? levarilab.com/osf-backup-t...
levarilab.com
OSF Backup Tool — Levari Lab
An R script to make a local copy of projects in your OSF account.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Important context for why we are making these changes is available in this summary: www.cos.io/blog/osf-cha...
cos.io
OSF Changes: A Note to Users
The Center for Open Science announced a significant change to the Open Science Framework (OSF). This post shares what led to the change, implications, and what's next.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Over the next several months, we will phase out some popular OSF features. These changes do not affect current public content, which remains safe and accessible. We have prepared support material to help users adapt. I am very sorry for the disruption to your work. Please read this post for details.
cos.io
OSF Changes | Center for Open Science
We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...
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Eric Hehman @erichehman.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
McGill social psych is now officially hiring at the assistant prof level, hooray Happy to chat with anyone about the position mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...
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Eric Hehman @erichehman.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
We have a new paper in Psych Review, creating a taxonomy of discrimination, in hopes of better organizing results and knowing when they might generalize With Becca Neel, @lorapark.bsky.social, Keita Christophe Free link: erichehman.com/wp-content/u...
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
🚨New Science Advances🚨 Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... -Exposure very low but highly concentrated -Reducing exposure by ~70% for months had no measurable effects *even among frequent consumers*
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Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) @improvingpsych.org · 22/07/2026
Congratulations to the “Project Implicit,” which received🏆2026 SIPS Mission Award! Project Implicit offers online tests to millions of participants, uses those tests to document implicit and explicit biases, and shares massive open datasets to power discoveries in psychology and beyond.
implicit.harvard.edu
Project Implicit
Project Implicit runs on small donations, most under $5. That’s what keeps the tests online, the data public, and the science accessible to anyone around the world who is interested in learning about…
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Chokely Carmichael🥋 @stewartcoles.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Engaging in the peer review process—from any position within it—would quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that the academy is full of groupthink. You can’t get even a small group of experts to agree on what is important or appropriate. Half the time they don’t even agree on what *is*.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
every time you write overly defensively you should remember that you are pursuing a strategy of writing careful sentences specifically for people who demonstrably either won't or can't read them
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Lizzie O'Leary @lizzieohreally.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
This entire Lost Science series the NYT has been doing is great: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/c...
nytimes.com
She Studied Ways to Make People Smarter
Jessica Cantlon had a grant with the U.S. Navy to explore whether people could improve spatial problem-solving skills through training. Then the program was cut.
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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
New paper w/ Soyeon Jeon, @lee-messi.bsky.social l, & @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social! We found that AI models were biased in inferring political ideology from images. Women were seen as more liberal than men than would be justified by real-world differences. 🧵 OA link: doi.org/10.1017/pan....
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
My new theory paper (early draft) A new reason why concentrated wealth destroys democracy: common ownership A standalone media owner maximizes profit. A common owner like Musk (who owns X + SpaceX) will run the media firm at a loss to increase the $ of his total portfolio tinyurl.com/mcekr7cd
Wealth Concentration and Democratic Erosion:
A Theory of Media and Common Ownership*
Jacob M. Grumbach„
June 18, 2026
Abstract
I develop a model of how extreme wealth concentration harms democracy through
a common ownership problem. A standalone profit-seeking media firm will maximize advertising revenue and audience size, producing content that is orthogonal
to democracy. In contrast, an owner who controls both a media firm and other
large firms can use the media firm to produce anti-democratic content, which
reduces the profitability of the media firm but maximizes the profitability of the
overall business portfolio through greater rents from an authoritarian leader (e.g.,
preferential regulatory treatment or public contracts). Anti-democratic content
grows in the owner’s wealth and in the authoritarian premium, the differential
value of concentrated capital under authoritarian governance. I theorize three
extensions: an oligopolistic setting in which reduced democratic content is a common pool resource; an endogenous authoritarian premium based in the authoritarian’s targeting problem; and owners that vary in proactively or reluctantly
supporting the authoritarian.
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Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
How does amount of counterattitudinal information influence whether and how much attitudes change? Rydell et al. (2007) found that implicit evaluations changed slowly and incrementally, whereas explicit evaluations changed abruptly in response to counterattitudinal info.
A plot showing incremental implicit evaluation change in response to 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 counterattitudinal statements.A plot showing abrupt explicit evaluation change in response to 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 counterattitudinal statements.
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Yamil Ricardo Velez @yamilrvelez.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Why do arguments often change people’s beliefs without changing their attitudes? In a new APSR with @scottclifford.bsky.social and @patrickpliu.bsky.social, we point to belief relevance: arguments are more persuasive when they grapple with the idiosyncratic reasons people hold their political views.
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Running an experiment to study racial discrimination? Going to use names to signal race? Here's a new tool! This helps you to choose the names you want to use based on: 1.) the strength of the racial signal you want to send 2.) whether you want to hold other factors (e.g., class) constant
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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
"Researchers are at a loss for why people across cultures and ages, regardless of their dominant hand, have a natural bias toward wandering in a counterclockwise direction." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/s...
nytimes.com
Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking
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