Questions like these are at the heart of our research. Every day, scholars around the world publish studies that help explain why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. Most of those discoveries rarely reach the public.

That’s why we created this research roundup series. We read the papers, filter for quality and relevance, and translate the findings into plain English.

As researchers, we are excited to share highlights from the studies we learn about in our field of social psychology, as well as related fields in the social and behavioral sciences.

Here are ten of our favorite new findings from the past month.

1. State media control influences large language models

Large language models exhibit a stronger pro-government stance in the languages of countries with lower media freedom than in those with higher media freedom.

In a series of six studies, researchers come to the troubling conclusion that states and powerful institutions have increased strategic incentives to leverage media control in the hopes of shaping AI output.

🔗 Link to the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10506-7

2. Envy is poison to the workplace

The university employees most likely to be targeted with exclusion and sabotage are the highest performers, and the driving emotion is envy.

Researchers tested this with 4,874 university employees across 339 work groups.

However, high performers who identified with their work group got targeted far less, because envy is deprived of oxygen when it feels as if your win belongs to everyone.

More from Todd Kashdan on this topic.

🔗 Link to the study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24490964/

3. Republicans report worse mental health as the share of Democrats living in their neighborhood increases

Democrats showed no such sensitivity.

Researchers found that for Republicans, these effects were as large as the mental health effects associated with living as a racial or ethnic minority in a neighborhood or living in an area with high levels of poverty.

These findings highlight how deeply political identity shapes the everyday lives of Americans and show that the social environment people live in can have an important impact on their well-being.

🔗 Link to the study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2522718123

4. Anti-democratic attitudes are highly contagious

Support for authoritarian leaders can spread socially among citizens in established democracies. By exposing people to peers with varying political views, researchers found evidence that people tend to adjust their own preference for strongman rule to match the attitudes of those around them.

“Even some participants who initially strongly rejected the idea of a leader bypassing parliament or elections became more accepting when they were told that such views were relatively common.”

Previous explanations for this trend have heavily focused on broad structural conditions. Scholars frequently look to economic instability, rising inequality, or cultural differences as the primary drivers of anti-democratic attitudes. This work suggests that social influence also plays an important role.

🔗 Link to the study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.70067

5. What increases your social status?

Being a trusted group member is #1. This is what people value in their community. One study identified 15 of the strongest status increasing criteria and 15 of the most status decreasing criteria.

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This matters because books are unusually scalable interventions. They are already written, widely available, and easy to bring into classrooms, workplaces, reading groups, or people’s daily routines. Yet nonfiction books written explicitly to change how people think and act have received far less scientific attention than fiction. That left us with a practical question: among all these plausible books and chapters, which ones should real people read first?

Our project quickly ran into a practical problem. There are numerous books about empathy, identity, moral disagreement, and bridging divides, each containing many chapters. A serious research project requires time, money, participants, and author permissions. We did not have the resources to ask hundreds of people to read every promising candidate. Before testing a book, we needed a principled way to choose the most promising book(s) for reducing partisan animosity.

We decided to reach out to potential authors and give them an opportunity to participate in a friendly competition: we would run simulations using artificial intelligence to determine which books had the biggest potential impact. The simulations would narrow the field, and real readers would determine the winner.

AI as a First-Round Reader

We use large language model simulations not as a substitute for people, but as a filter to help select the books that might be most effective. There is promising precedent for this approach. In a recent paper at Nature (preprint), our former NYU colleague Ashwini Ashokkumar and colleagues found that GPT-4 simulations correlated strongly with results from actual social science experiments (r = .85), even for unpublished studies. The models tended to overestimate effect sizes, but the approach was extremely effective for determining which treatments would work best.

That limitation shaped our strategy. First, we ranked books and chapters rather than treating simulated effect sizes as literal forecasts. Then we looked for consensus across models, reducing the chance that one model’s quirks would determine the winner. The goal was not to declare that a book “works.” It was to find the candidates with the most promise for real world testing (which will be very expensive and time consuming).

We assembled a pool of 26 prosocial nonfiction books using expert input, AI suggestions, author recommendations, permissions, and through personal contact with authors. We got author permission to use these books and ensured they were not used for training purposes by commercial models. We also included several control nonfiction books, like nutrition book How Not to Age, to ensure the models were providing null estimates where appropriate, and added Power of Us into the mix.

The final list of books (with authors in parentheses) were: (1) Facing the Fracture (Tania Israel); (2) Lovingkindness (Sharon Salzberg); (3) Beyond Your Bubble (Tania Israel); (4) I Never Thought of It That Way (Mónica Guzmán); (5) Why Are We Yelling? (Buster Benson); (6) The Righteous Mind (Jonathan Haidt); (7) High Conflict (Amanda Ripley); (8) Love Your Enemies (Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman); (9) A Heart as Wide as the World (Sharon Salzberg); (10) War for Kindness (Jamil Zaki); (11) Hope for Cynics (Jamil Zaki); (12) Be You (Cirak); (13) Outraged (Kurt Gray); (14) God Is a Conservative (Cirak); (15) The Evolution of Cooperation (Robert Axelrod); (16) Klan Whisperer (Daryl Davis); (17) Power of Us (Jay J. Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer); (18) Moral Tribes (Joshua Greene); (19) Blueprint (Nicholas A. Christakis); (20) The Better Angels of Our Nature (Steven Pinker); (21) The Expanding Circle (Peter Singer); and (22) Why Nations Fail (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson).

The control books were: (23) Jerks at Work (Tessa West); (24) Job Therapy (Tessa West); (25) How Not to Age (Michael Greger); and (26) The Brass Check (Upton Sinclair).

Then, chapter by chapter, we asked several models to simulate American Democrats and Republicans (using an R package Remi developed, called nalanda). Each simulated reader rated their warmth toward both parties, “read” a chapter, and rated them again. Our outcome was the change in affective polarization—the warmth gap between political ingroup and outgroup. A smaller gap after reading made a chapter more promising as an intervention.

To reduce randomness, we used fixed seeds and temperature 0 wherever supported (gpt-5-mini only supports a temperature of 1). The process was still messier than it sounds. Some models refused to adopt a partisan identity (presumably for safety reasons), others flagged particular chapters, and repeated runs varied because of cost and interrupted jobs. We treated these outputs as a screening signal, not a precise estimate of what a human reader would feel and you should take the effect size estimates with a grain of salt. Before combining models, we first examined what an individual model seemed to say, with GPT-5 mini below as a case example. You can see that Facing the Fracture appeared to be the most effective at reducing affective polarization.

We then examined the results at a finer level. The next figure shows how the simulated chapter effects differed for Democrats and Republicans across six illustrative books. This view reveals possibilities that a single book average can hide, but it is also noisier and more sensitive to the model and chapter selected. It also shows that one of our control books (How Not to Age) had no impact on affective polarization for either party. This is an important sign that our simulations are not reacting selectively to relevant content.

The AI Models Agreed Until They Didn’t

Then came one of the most interesting questions in our investigation: did the AI models agree with one another?

They agreed most on the broad choice of book and less as the decision became more specific. Across the five models used in our primary consensus, the average pairwise correlation was r = .68 at the book level, but only .48 at the book-by-chapter-by-party level. In other words, the models agreed more about which books to read than about what chapters to prescribe to a reader.

One model, GPT-4o mini, barely tracked the others. Rather than quietly averaging all six together, we based the primary ranking on the five models that showed meaningful convergence and kept the sixth as a useful warning: “an LLM result” is not a single, interchangeable thing. Consensus does not guarantee that the five models are correct, but disagreement is information too.

The Books That Rose to the Top

Three books rose most consistently to the top of every simulation: Tania Israel’s Facing the Fracture and Beyond Your Bubble, and Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness. Other books about moral conflict and social repair also ranked highly, including I Never Thought of It That Way, Why Are We Yelling?, High Conflict, The Righteous Mind, and Love Your Enemies.

A Ranking Is Not a Decision

The AI model ratings were our strongest signal, but not our only criterion for selecting a book. A book also has to be readable, practical, engaging, and capable of supplying at least one excellent chapter. We standardized each dimension to a common scale and combined them in a weighted rubric.

Some of these criteria were straightforward. We used audiobook duration as a proxy for how long each text would take to read (although participants in our study will read the books, not listen to the audiobooks). Every book also received credit for the standardized score of its strongest chapter, and we used Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite to estimate chapter readability.

Others required more invention. The reader score combined star ratings from Amazon and Goodreads with review volume, rewarding books that were both well received and widely read. For the polarization score, we analyzed review language in 1,000-token segments using the Negative Affective Polarization Dictionary. This captures polarized reactions among readers, not whether the book itself is “polarizing.”

The broader rubric produced a useful result: Facing the Fracture and Lovingkindness tied for first place (weighted score = .87). Rather than elevating one over the other, the expanded criteria confirmed them as a shared top tier after feasibility, readability, reader response, and review language were added. That convergence gave us a clear reason to test both.

Testing two active books also makes the pilot a genuine second round of the competition. With only one, human data could tell us whether that chapter beats the controls, but not which finalist performs better. The contrast also matters beyond the competition: Facing the Fracture speaks directly to the political realities of the United States, whereas Lovingkindness offers a more general approach to intergroup interactions and is available in translation. If they prove equally effective, Lovingkindness may be easier to apply across countries.

From Books to Chapters

The finalists point toward two different psychological routes. In Facing the Fracture, Chapter 4, “Correct Distorted Perceptions,” ranked highest. It targets a well-known problem in political conflict: people often imagine the other side as more extreme and hostile than it really is. In Lovingkindness, Chapter 6, “Breaking Open the Loving Heart,” offers a complementary route by cultivating concern beyond one’s usual circle.

Now, the Human Test

Round two of our study will involve roughly 1,000 U.S. adults in a planned one-hour online pilot. They will be randomly assigned to read one of the two finalist chapters, read the “Diet” chapter from Michael Greger’s neutral nutrition book How Not to Age, or take a smartphone break. The reading groups will also see a short video summary and complete a chatbot-guided reflection.

We will measure political warmth, behavioral choices involving political ingroup and outgroup members, open-mindedness, identification with humanity, and related democratic attitudes and behaviors. The deeper hypothesis is that a book can widen the reader’s sense of “we,” helping people see themselves not only as Democrats or Republicans but as members of communities that cross the political divide. The pilot is planned for the end of summer, and its preregistration is in progress.

What Comes Next

If the pilot identifies a promising candidate, the final round of our study is a 10-week randomized controlled trial in which participants will read daily excerpts and listen to weekly podcasts on the book contents. A study of that scale depends on securing substantial new funding. Readers who know a promising funder or research partner are very welcome to contact us.

The real test now belongs to human readers. But the simulations have already improved the experiment: instead of choosing a book through guesswork, reputation, or convenience, we have two finalists supported by several distinct forms of evidence.

This project also raises a larger question: what can we really conclude from research comparing fiction and nonfiction as tools for changing how people think and relate to one another? We will take up that debate in a future newsletter.

Have a book you think we should test? Share it in the comments, by email, or through our dedicated survey.

Author note: Rémi Thériault is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at New York University and an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR). More at remi-theriault.com. A lot of people also made this work possible: Benjamin Choi, Bella Goldstein, Androw Ramy, Robin Shanholtz, Anna-Celine Guilas, Steve Rathje, Laura Globig, & Jay Van Bavel.

If you want more research bulletins, practical handouts, and behind-the-scenes updates on our polarization studies, upgrade to paid and support The Power of Us.

News and Updates

The same psychology that allows us to build vibrant communities, organizations, and nations is also what drives us apart. In this talk at the 2026 Mind & Life Institute Jay explained why identity is one of the most powerful forces shaping human behavior — for cooperation and for conflict alike. Drawing on decades of research, he revealed how something as simple as being assigned to an arbitrary group can spark favoritism toward "us" over "them," and how those same identities can be reshaped toward broader, more inclusive belonging. He also discussed how modern technology, like social media, is shaping these very basic aspects of human social psychology in perverse ways — often bringing out the worst in us, rather than the best. You can now watch the full talk here:

Jay will be giving a talk on “Why Outrage Goes Viral: Influence, Identity, Polarization” live in Brooklyn, NY on August 6th at 6pm. This is part of the Lectures on Tap series where professors, experts, and storytellers give thought-provoking lectures in NYC bars. Get your ticket here and enjoy a conversation over a drink with Jay after the talk! Let him know if you are a newsletter subscriber.

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Join us for “Ask Me Anything” sessions for summer! Premium subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from chatting about research, career advice, professional dilemmas, to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings. At our July meeting, multiple people showed up and we designed a study together explore how people update their beliefs.

Join us! Upgrade your subscription using the button below. Invites to RSVP will be sent via email from powerofusbook@gmail.com.

• August TBA @ EST with Dom

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Read the last newsletter…

There’s one week left to Turi Munthe’s book giveaway for Why We Think What We Think. Check out last week’s newsletter to enter the drawing!

The Power of Us

You Didn’t Choose All Your Beliefs

Why do some people believe in ghosts but not God? Why do liberals tolerate pineapple on pizza more than conservatives? Why do descendants of rice farmers tend to think differently from descendants of wheat farmers? We like to imagine our beliefs are chosen carefully, through deliberation. But many of them are shaped by forces we barely notice. In a new book titled…

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a month ago · 18 likes · 14 comments · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel and Turi Munthe

Learn more about THE POWER OF US

If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below).

These studies get retold endlessly in textbooks, news articles, TV, and social media. Through repetition, they become myths. Few people read the original research, so critical details get lost, underlying lessons get distorted, and follow-up work that clarifies what the studies actually showed gets ignored entirely.

We’ve written about all of these at greater length in previous columns and in our book. What follows is a guide to the biggest myths we keep encountering—covering Groupthink, the Stanford Prison Experiment, bystander intervention, Milgram’s obedience studies, and conformity—along with how researchers currently think about each one. We hope a few of these challenge your assumptions about human nature.

MYTH 1. Groupthink wasn’t the major factor in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — it was “politicothink”.

The failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion became the classic example of “groupthink,” a theory developed by psychologist Irving Janis. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon where members of a group prioritize consensus, harmony, and conformity over critical thinking. Janis proposed that pressures for conformity and group cohesion caused President John F. Kennedy and his advisors to suppress doubts and become overconfident about their decision to invade Cuba.

However, additional context unearthed by psychologist Roderick Kramer challenged this interpretation, showing that Kennedy actually had serious reservations about the invasion and felt politically trapped into proceeding. Kramer argued that the real problem was “politicothink,” where leaders prioritized political image over military effectiveness, partially because Kennedy feared criticism from Richard Nixon (the previous administration’s Vice President) if he canceled the plan.

The obsession with groupthink has misled many people about the function and value of groups. Strong group cohesion is not always harmful, since long-term teams with trust and psychological safety are often better at encouraging honest disagreement and critical thinking. Ultimately, effective leadership and healthy group norms are key to preventing poor decision-making in organizations and governments. We wrote about this for the Wall Street Journal.

To read the full story:

MYTH 2: The Stanford Prison Experiment we not about the power of roles — it was about the power of identity leadership.

Perhaps the most famous and controversial study in social psychology was the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment led by Philip Zimbardo. It seemed to show that ordinary people naturally become cruel when placed into positions of power, especially as prison guards. However, nearly half a century after the experiment, the full study notes and new recordings were made available to us and we came to very different conclusions.

Several researchers (Ben Blum, Alex Haslam, Steve Reicher, Thibault Le Texier and Jay) combed through audio recordings and archival evidence revealed that the guards did not spontaneously become abusive. Instead, they were pressured and coached by the experimenters to behave harsher toward prisoners. The study was actually an example of identity leadership, where authorities encouraged guards to see cruelty as part of a shared mission and moral purpose.

The article also highlights the importance of dissent, emphasizing how another Stanford researcher, including Christina Maslach and several guards, resisted the abusive dynamic. Ultimately, the initial interpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment created a misleading myth about human nature. Cruelty is less often shaped by roles themselves, rather they are more shaped by leadership, social pressure, and the belief that harmful actions serve a greater good.

To read the full story:

MYTH #3: The origin story about the callousness of bystanders was wrong.

The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese became famous for the news coverage claiming that 38 witnesses failed to help despite hearing her cries for help, inspiring social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané to conduct a series of famous studies and develop the theory of the bystander effect. They argued that people are less likely to intervene during emergencies when others are present because individuals look to the crowd for cues and assume someone else will take responsibility.

Additional details revealed that the story was more complex than originally reported in the news, since some neighbors did attempt to help or contact police, but the lack of a modern 911 system contributed to confusion. Later studies by psychologist Mark Levine found that people are indeed more likely to help others as long as they feel a shared social identity or connection with them. Other research has found that bystander interventions might be far more common overall—possibly because we do share many connections with regular people.

To read the full story:

MYTH 4: The Milgram’s experiments revealed just at much about disobedience as obedience to authority.

In a series of shocking obedience experiments by Stanley Milgram, participants believed they were delivering painful electric shocks to another person simply because an authority figure instructed them to continue. Although Milgram’s studies were long interpreted as proof that humans blindly obey authority, later analyses revealed that obedience depended more on identity and allegiance than mindless conformity.

Researchers discovered that many participants resisted at key moments, especially when the learner first demanded to be released, forcing them to choose between loyalty to the experimenter or sympathy for the victim. In addition, nearly half of the subjects across all of Milgram’s experiments disobeyed the instructions of the experimenter. The story commonly discussed is only a subset of trials. Ultimately, obedience and disobedience are shaped by whom people identify with, showing that humans are not simply passive followers in the face of authority.

To read the full story:

MYTH 5: Conformity does not lead to irrationality—people often know exactly what they are doing.

The conformity experiments of Solomon Asch suggest that many people would knowingly give incorrect answers about simple line comparisons just to match the opinions of a group; folding to the pressures of conformity. Below, you can try the task yourself.

Did you get it right? When students completed the task alone, they almost never made mistakes.

But Asch added a twist. In group settings, everyone except for one real participant was secretly in on the experiment. At key moments, these stooges deliberately chose obviously wrong answers — and the real participant, answering last, had to decide whether to trust their own eyes or go along with the crowd. The results were stunning: 76% of participants conformed at least once! And on average, people went along with the group about a third of the time.

Although these studies were often interpreted as evidence that humans irrationally follow crowds, later research revealed that conformity can also be a rational response to uncertainty. Dom’s experiments involving difficult visual tasks found that people used the opinions of others as valuable information when they were unsure, even without social pressure. Research by Bert Hodges further found that people sometimes resist conformity even when the group is likely correct because they value independence and authenticity. This suggests that conformity reflects a balance between accuracy, belonging, and personal integrity, making it both a powerful social strength and a vulnerability when groups discourage dissent or critical thinking.

LESSONS LEARNED:

These five “myths” all point to the same meta-lesson: the most famous social psych findings are often right about the phenomenon (people conform, obey, ignore, rationalize harm), but wrong about the psychological process.

When you look into the social context, behavior looks less like mindless conformity and more like a product of identity, norms, leadership, incentives, and uncertainty. People don’t simply “become cruel” because of roles; cruelty is cultivated when authorities legitimize it and groups come to see harm as serving a higher purpose. People don’t act like passive bystanders because they don’t care; they hesitate when responsibility is ambiguous and act more when they feel a shared bond. And conformity isn’t always irrational—it can be a social or informational strategy under uncertainty.

The practical implication is optimistic: if bad outcomes aren’t hardwired into human nature, then changing the situation—the norms you reward, the identities you activate, the clarity of responsibility, and the safety to dissent can reliably change what groups do. This is the core message from our newsletter and it is a lesson that becomes clear when you ignore the mythology and stories that go viral and instead dig into the actual details of these studies and historial lessons.

News and Updates

Jay will be hosting a live executive webinar with Laura Kriska on June 3rd at 1pm EST on how “Human collaboration is a competitive advantage”. All newsletter subscribers are invited to attend live and join a Q&A session. Jay & Laura will be discussing their article “4 Research-Backed Ways to Help Your Team Collaborate Better” which was featured in a recent special issue in Harvard Business Review. You can RSVP here to attend.

Jay will be having a live conversation on substack with Jacqueline Nesi on June 4th at 4pm EST on the big question: “Is a digital detox really worth it? What tech is doing to our relationships and mental health.” All newsletter subscribers are invited to attend live and join a Q&A session.

Jacki is a clinical psychologist and professor at Brown University who writes the popular newsletter TechnoSapiens. She studies how technology and social media impact mental health (especially for teens), and how parents can help their kids navigate it. Here is is an example of one of her recent posts:

Techno Sapiens

Are school phone bans working?

5 min read…

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3 months ago · 35 likes · 10 comments · Jacqueline Nesi, PhD

Talk to Us

Use our Mailbox to send us your questions

We also now have a mailbox where you can send us your questions and we will share the answers in a newsletter once a month

Talk to the “Power of Us Chatbot”

We created a “Power of Us Chatbot” for subscribers. It is trained on our book and newsletter to answer any questions you have about our content and applying it to your own questions. The chatbot was created by Androw Ramy and Rémi Thériault in the Center for Conflict & Cooperation. It’s also an ethnical chatbot (as you can see below, it blocked Dominic from attempting to blackmail Jay). Let us know if you like it or have any suggestions. You’ll need to use the password: _subscriber

Join us for “Ask Me Anything” sessions for summer! Premium subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from workshopping research questions, career advice to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings. Upgrade your subscription using the button below.

Invites to RSVP have been sent via email from powerofusbook@gmail.com

• June 4 @ 4:00pm EST with Dom

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• August TBA @ EST with Dom

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Catch up on the last one…

Last week we shared a preprint explaining how a minority of internet users shape public opinion. Specifically, we trace how social media influencers can turn fringe claims into viral narratives —voften by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms, and crowds.

The Power of Us

Tyranny of the online minority

In 2014 there was a sudden outbreak of measles among visitors to Disneyland that spread across California. Renée DiResta was looking for a preschool for her children when she traced this outbreak to anti-vaccine misinformation circulating among moms groups on social media. This discovery led her down a rabbit hole to understand an entirely new ecosystem of persuasion driven by online influencers, algorithms and crowds. According to her book…

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3 months ago · 19 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel and Raunak Pillai

One of the reasons we loved Mickey as grad students is because he would share all his opinions and he welcomed disagreement. He was fun to debate and never got defensive. This made science discussions with him a lot of fun. He now writes the “Speak Now, Regret Later” substack where he shares his controversial takes on the field of social psychology and often responds to his critics.

Speak Now Regret Later

An unfiltered exploration of psychology, culture, and the world through the eyes of an impulsive yet remorseful professor

By Michael Inzlicht

We invited him to share his controversial column on the downfall of Stereotype Threat. When he started at the University of Toronto, Mickey was most known for his research on stereotype threat and that line of research was among the most prominent ideas in the field. We remember walking through SPSP during graduate school and seeing countless posters on implicit attitudes, ego depletion, and stereotype threat—it seemed like everyone was studying at least one of those topics.

In the last decade, all of those topics have come under a great deal of scrutiny. A mix of failed replications and methodological criticisms has called into question these bodies of research. (Jay has a chapter on the “replication crisis” in social psychology that you can read here). And, while there is still ongoing debate about the scope and scale of these ideas, we wanted to share Mickey’s perspective on the topic since it touches on the core themes of our newsletter (i.e., identity and group dynamics).

Another day, another idol falls.

This one has been teetering for years, so the collapse didn’t come as a shock. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.

I’m talking about stereotype threat, a once-revolutionary idea that shaped how social psychologists thought about identity, achievement, and inequality. For decades, it inspired research, drove interventions, and promised insights into the invisible forces that constrain human potential.

I still remember seeing its most eloquent advocate, Stanford University’s Claude Steele, deliver a keynote address in 1999 at the annual convention of what was then called the American Psychological Society. It was my first ever conference, my first trip to Denver, and Steele was nothing short of magnetic. Charismatic and at the height of his powers, he commanded the stage like no academic I had ever seen. He delivered his message with the kind of confidence that makes you believe science can change the world. Professor Steele was a rock star, and I was as giddy seeing him on stage as I was seeing Kurt Cobain on stage a few years earlier.

What is Stereotype Threat?

The concept of stereotype threat, first proposed by Claude Steele in the early 1990s, posited that individuals who are part of a negatively stereotyped group can, in certain situations, experience anxiety about confirming those stereotypes, leading paradoxically to underperformance, thus confirming the disparaging stereotype. The initial research was groundbreaking.

In 1995, Steele and his student Joshua Aronson—who went on to become my postdoc supervisor years later—demonstrated that the notorious Black-white gap in academic performance could be partially closed when negative stereotypes impugning Black people’s intelligence were made irrelevant. When Black students at Stanford University were told that a test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, they performed worse than their white counterparts. However, when this stereotype threat was ostensibly removed—by simply framing the test as a measure of problem-solving rather than intelligence—the performance gap between Black and white students nearly vanished.

Suddenly, here was an explanation for why certain groups didn’t perform as well in academic settings. And it wasn’t just race; follow-up studies looked at women in math and science. Women, who dominate men in most academic disciplines, underperform in STEM fields because they were regularly, albeit subtly, reminded of the stereotype that women aren’t good at math, or so the story goes. The idea felt revolutionary, hopeful even, because it suggested that these vexing performance gaps could be addressed by changing people’s immediate environments rather than accepting them as fixed outcomes, inherent to the groups themselves

These findings were exhilarating. Before long, stereotype threat was not only the darling of social psychology, but it also became the darling of the political left who now had an answer to prevailing views of group differences held by the political right. This is partly because shortly before stereotype threat took its turn in the spotlight, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which resulted in a media firestorm that has had repercussions to this day. Not only did the book discuss racial differences in intelligence as real and consequential—and not mere products of culturally biased IQ tests—it suggested that a non-negligible factor in this gap was due to biological differences. This thesis was so toxic that the octogenarian Murray is still considered a pariah, shouted down and deplatformed from talks he tries to deliver at respectable colleges to this day.

Stereotype threat, in contrast, was a breath of fresh air. It promised that group differences were malleable, not fixed. They could be explained as momentary apprehension, akin to the nerves that might cause an elite athlete to choke on competition day. Yes, these group differences still have consequences, but now we have a remedy—change the situation so that stereotypes are less likely to be in the air and watch as all the Black students and female mathematicians rise to the top.

I too was swept up by this mania. I studied stereotype threat as a PhD student and published some of the first papers on the topic. My dissertation and very first publication suggested that subtle aspects of a room—like how many men and women were in a math classroom—could be enough to evoke stereotype threat and undermine performance. Because my field became captivated by stereotype threat, this meant that I was quickly offered jobs, grants, tenure, and acclaim. I edited a book on stereotype threat and was asked to add my name and research to briefs delivered to the US Supreme Court. My career benefitted immensely.

The Replicators are Coming

Then things started going sideways. And not just for stereotype threat.

It’s all very complicated. Lots of strands in old Duder’s head. But here’s the skinny. In the early 2010s, psychology started looking inward, asking hard questions about the robustness of our most cherished findings. This happened because in the early 2000s, our best journals regularly included studies that were ludicrous and hard to believe. For example, researchers made dubious claims about the role of blood glucose and self-control, and found positive evidence for these claims, despite their biological impossibility. A paper was published in social psychology’s most prestigious journal claiming evidence for clairvoyance, essentially offering a ringer for a ringer. Ludicrous. If these impossible ideas were generating support with the standard methods of social psychology, maybe our methods are not what we thought they were.

A small cadre of reformers then started raising awareness that all was not right in how we conducted our science: we did not bother replicating important studies, we were misusing and abusing our statistical tools, and we did not publish all our studies—particularly the failed ones. And when some brave scientists decided to audit the field by closely replicating many studies, only about a quarter from social psychology could be successfully replicated. Since these dark days, the field has changed immensely, and we’re slowly producing more respectable science today.

Nonetheless, the entire field’s evidentiary basis was now suspect. After all, they were produced by methods that we now consider questionable. Stereotype threat was no different. I would love to say that stereotype threat was an exception, that it survived replication attempts and other audits, and that a beloved idea can still be used to counter damaging claims about group differences. But new data now reveal what many of us suspected for at least ten years: stereotype threat does not replicate, and it does not undermine academic performance in the ways we thought.

This new data emerged from what is called a Registered Replication Report. This was no ordinary replication study; it used the gold standard of scientific rigor. Conducted by multiple labs across the U.S. and Europe, and led by Andrea Stoevenbelt this study (still a preprint) was preregistered (meaning all methods and analyses were specified before the data were collected) and involved over 1,500 participants. It replicated the exact procedures of a well-known stereotype threat study published in 2005 by Mike Johns, Toni Schmader, and Andy Martens—all colleagues and friends I deeply respect.

The original study had found that women performed worse on math tests when reminded of gender stereotypes but performed on par with men when they were instead taught about stereotype threat. The idea was that awareness of the phenomenon of stereotype threat helped mitigate its effects, which was why this original paper was so influential: it offered a simple intervention to close the gender-gap in math performance. The replication was designed to be thorough, with consistent methodology across sites and a sample size large enough to detect even small effects.

Despite following these procedures to the letter, the replication found no effect. Women who were ostensibly in a threat condition didn’t perform any worse than those who were instead taught about threat. And the difference between men and women’s math performance remained consistent across the board, regardless of how the test was framed. The stereotype threat effect, once thought to be so robust, just wasn’t there.

What Does This Mean for Stereotype Threat?

Does one failed replication debunk the entire theory of stereotype threat? No, of course not. But it’s not just one study. There are now multiple failed replications, large-sample studies that found no effect, and at least one bias-corrected meta-analysis pointing to the same conclusion: if stereotype threat exists, it is far weaker and more inconsistent than we originally believed. I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.

I have seen some people online suggest the reason this failed to replicate is that women are no longer stereotyped as not being good at math. While I do not disagree that cultural stereotypes about women in STEM might have changed since 2005 when the original paper was first published, I’m skeptical this is the main culprit behind this non-replication. First, women remain heavily outnumbered in STEM fields. The latest statistics indicate that women comprise only 25% of STEM workers in Canada and 27% in the US. And, depending on what is counted as STEM—I have heard some argue that psychology should be included—this number might be a lot lower. So, the stereotype about what is and what is not a female job might still be around, as much as we’d like it not to be.

Second, for years, many of us have suspected that something wasn’t right. There were warning signs: tiny sample sizes, flexible analyses, and implausibly large effect sizes given the relatively modest interventions being tested. In some cases, stereotype threat effects were found only in very specific handpicked samples—another red flag. It turns out that many of the original studies were conducted at a time when researchers—and I count myself here—were less stringent about methodological rigor.

Let’s be honest: that last sentence was far too generous. Many of us engaged in practices that, in hindsight, were borderline dishonest. We abused experimenter degrees of freedom, engaged in questionable research practices, p-hacked, massaged our data—you pick the euphemism. In contrast, this new replication study followed the most up-to-date best practices in psychological science, eliminating room for flexibility in analysis or results interpretation.

In my opinion—one that I have shared widely over the years—studies like this do more than demonstrate that stereotype threat is not replicable. They raise unsettling questions about the broader field of social psychology. If stereotype threat is not real, not robust, what else was I taught in my introduction to psychology classes that is also suspect? Despite all our improvements that help us in the present and future, we still have a massive backlog of studies from the past that we need to reckon with. Yes, the future looks bright, but we need to have the courage to put our most cherished findings under the spotlight.

The bill of reckoning for social psychology is past due.

A Reckoning…and a Path Forward

The fall of stereotype threat is not just about one theory collapsing: it’s a moment of reckoning for the entire field of social psychology. Stereotype threat was more than an idea — it was a promise, a way to understand inequality and to imagine solutions. Its failure forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about how science is done and what happens when beloved ideas turn out to be wrong.

But this reckoning, painful as it is, should not lead us to despair. The scientific process thrives on self-correction, on challenging old paradigms and building stronger ones in their place. What we’re experiencing now is science doing what it’s supposed to do: correcting itself. If we care about understanding the human mind and addressing real-world inequalities, we need to keep asking hard questions and demanding better evidence—not just for stereotype threat but for every cherished finding.

For me, letting go of stereotype threat has been both humbling and liberating. It has forced me to recalibrate how I think about research, advocacy, and the stories we tell about human potential. It’s a reminder that science, at its best, is about progress, not protecting idols.

We also had our own experience with Stereotype Threat research as graduate students and thought we’d share it for the first time:

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You start to wonder: Am I out of touch? Is this what people really think?

Now imagine that wave wasn’t a wave of people at all.

That’s one of the central risks we outline in our new Science Policy Forum article on malicious AI swarms—coordinated fleets of AI agents that can imitate authentic social opinions and actions at scale.

Why is this dangerous for democracy? No democracy can guarantee perfect truth, but democratic deliberation depends on something more fragile: the independence of voices. The “wisdom of crowds” works only if the crowd is made of distinct individuals; when one actor can speak through thousands of masks—and create the illusion of grassroots agreement—that independence collapses into…

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After the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, the bestselling books were religious extremist texts and witch-hunting manuals. In other words, what went “viral” in the Middle Ages wasn’t so different from the salacious conspiracy theories you see flooding social media today.

While studies find that moral outrage and negativity about political opponents go “viral” on social media, this is also true of the offline world. Gossip is common in everyday conversation, mostly negative, and often about people we dislike.

Just as “cancellations” go viral on social media, gossip spread widely in hunter-gather societies, and was similarly centered around other people’s antisocial behavior.

In a new paper called “The Psychology of Virality,” recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, we argue that, just like some viruses are more c…

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In the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest on the topic of intellectual humility(see the figure below). This had led to the development of at least 10 new scales to measure intellectual humility and hundreds of new studies on the topic. If you agree with statements like “I welcome different ways of thinking about important topics” and disagree with statements like “I believe my ideas are superior to others’ ideas” then you would be considered an intellectual humble individual.

It turns out that intellectual humility is a great trait to have. People who score high on these measures are less likely to spread conspiracy theories or misinformation, express out-group prejudice, and feel polarized. They are more likely to follow public health guidelines, reason carefully about political issues, and update their beliefs in light of novel information.

However, the variety of different measures makes it difficult to know which scale to use or how to interpret different results produced by competing scales. Thus, creates the worrisome possibility that scholars in this area are committing the jingle fallacy (using different labels for the same thing) or the jangle fallacy (using the same label for different things) in this research.

Therefore, Jay conducted a series of ten studies (including over 5,900 participants) with Philip Parnamets and Mark Alfano to generate a single unified measure of intellectual humility. We called it the “Collected Intergroup Intergroup Humility Scale”. You can download our paper here if you want to read the details from our research.

One key feature of our measure is that we created a subscale to measure reasoning in the context of intergroup conflict. Prior measured focused on individual reasoning in a social vaccuum or merely in the context of dyadic disagreements. This is a remarkable omission because the biggest challenge for many people is responding with humility in the face of criticism from out-group members. Therefore, we created a number of items to capture the ability to question or challenge their own group and remain open to ideas from outsiders

Overall, we found five key factors of intellectual humility:

1. Open-mindedness: being open to new perspectives and evidence, especially when they are not consistent with one’s existing ideas. People who score high on this scale agreed with items like “I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true”.

2. Intellectual defensiveness: reacting emotionally or negatively to disagreement and the possibility of one’s own cognitive limitations. People who score high on this scale disagree with items like “I feel uncomfortable when someone points out one of my intellectual shortcomings".

3. Intellectual arrogance: indifference to truth or the possibility of being wrong. People who score high on this scale disagree with items like “I don’t really enjoy gaining new knowledge”.

4. Sense of intellectual superiority: believing you or your group is smarter or better at reasoning than other individuals or groups. People who score high on this scale agree with items like “My ideas are usually better than other people’s ideas”.

5. Ingroup criticism: actively seeking out and correcting errors in reasoning by one’s in-group. People who score high on this scale agreed with items like “To avoid group-think, it’s important to be extra critical of your own group’s ideas”.

We include all the items below so you can measure your own intellectual humility of give it to your friends and colleagues!

Although these factors were all correlated with one another, they seemed to capture distinct sub-scales (see figure below). We also found that intelligence, numeracy, and reasoning skills were only weakly correlated with these five factors (all correlations were below r = .16). This suggests that intellectual humility is not simply reducible to basic cognitive abilities. We also suspect that intellectual humility might be easier to cultivate than basic intelligence, which is highly stable over time within individuals.

You can see how you score on each of these items to assess your own degree of intellectual humility. You are also free to share our measure with your friends, family and coworkers and discuss their scores. Have them answer each question below on a 7-point scale their level of agreement with each item, with 1 =“strongly disagree” to 7 = “strongly agree.”

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In a new pre-print, we review how and why politics can shape health outcomes, especially in a highly polarized environment. We argue that people’s political identities ultimately shape the health decisions they make.

To explain why this happens, we answer two questions: What shapes peoples’ health decisions? And how does social identity affect these decisions?

What shapes people’s health decisions?

When we are deciding whether to get vaccinated, start a new workout routine, or quit smoking, what determines whether we take the plunge or hold back? Psychologists argue that these decisions are based on our beliefs about the behavior. In particular, we can distinguish three kinds of relevant beliefs.

First, we can have behavioral beliefs about different properties of the behavior itself. This includes beliefs like “vaccinations will …

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Our latest paper explains why people tune their moral behavior to fit the social context. Building on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we illustrate how moral action depends on three factors: attitudes (what we believe is right and what we expect moral action will lead to), perceived control (whether we feel we can act effectively), and situational norms (what feels acceptable in that moment). The situational norms are especially influential because they signal which behaviors will be rewarded or punished, which helps explain why the s…

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Jareef is a postdoc at the Department of Strategy and Management. Together with Jay Van Bavel from New York University and professors Helge Torbjørnsen and Hallgeir Sjåstad (Department of Strategy and Management), they have a new paper on group identities and dishonest behavior.

The researchers tested whether the tendency to behave dishonestly is influenced by the group identity of either the victim or the beneficiary of the cheating. This was studied in three experiments with more than 5,230 Americans in total, and with real money.

Is there a difference if the victim of your cheating is part of our “in-group” or is in the “out-group”?

Surprisingly not. For purely selfish dishonesty, people lied equally regardless of whether it came at a cost to an in-gr…

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This tendency to avoid out-group sources narrows our perspectives, deepens political polarization, and can undermine trust in democratic institutions. This is part of a broader trend of political sectarianism, where the other side is seen not just as wrong, but as evil (as shown in the figure below). So, what can be done?

Our new research finds evidence for a fresh solution: Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help people bypass these deep-seated partisan biases

Nearly a billion people now use AI chatbots. And as tools like ChatGPT become more common, they are transforming how we access information. We reasoned that beca…

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In the last few years, we have seen headlines like “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading”, “Fewer People Are Reading for Fun”, and “Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read” dominate the news. These have cast a chill over the publishing industry and led bookworms like us to panic about the future of humanity.

Despite the gloom, booksellers in the United States saw the first annual increase of print book sales in three years in 2024. It was a reminder that even in our increasingly digital age, books remain a powerful, and popular, force—not just for entertainment, but for personal growth. Maybe the media was too fast to write the obituary about books.

Social psychologist Rémi Thériault, wh…

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The Many Faces of National Pride

What it means to be proud of one’s country depends on how we think about our national identity. And national identity, as it turns out, can take many forms. One key distinction lies between healthy, secure national identity—rooted in civic values, solidarity, and genuine care for one’s fellow citizens—and a defensive, superficial one, more concerned with appearances and external recognition than with what the country stands for or how its people are actually doing. A prominent example of the latter is called national narcissism.

In Caravaggio’s famous painting of Narcissus, a hand…

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What does your merch say about you?

Last week, video essayist and writer Mina Le of High Brow published a thoughtful (viral) video essay on Youtube in which she discussed the history of merch, its evolution, and how it signals different identities and statuses. She explains that the purpose of merch is to promote something—a band, an organization, etc—but it can also signal a person’s values, identities, and interests. Merch can bring people together (or drive people apart) because it visually signals our social identification to the world.

But Mina claims that the merch industry has gone too far, and it…

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