Ben Saunders
@bensaun.bsky.social
210 followers 210 following 44 posts
Social Psychologist at LIU–Brooklyn | Politics, Race, & Ideology Collaboratory (PRIDECo) | Just a middle-aged dad trying to live the dream | Compulsive dad-joker | Loves: Cycling, Coffee, Hiphop; All Views: My Own.
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Reposted by Ben Saunders
when i wrote about these folks being segregationists, i was told it was a stretch

if anything, i undersold their venality
Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People
www.nytimes.com
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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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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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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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They do not realize this at all or refuse to acknowledge it.
When I see this, I wonder if people realize that Jim Crow racism in the American south was a type home-grown fascism. It was not (just) a superficially genteel system of social deference. Refusing to defer was often met with incredible violence designed to terrorize the entire Black community.
Reposted by Ben Saunders
Reposted by Ben Saunders
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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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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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.
How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart
www.nytimes.com
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10 years ago?! Holy smokes.
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*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...
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
www.theguardian.com
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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
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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
The Racist Foundation of the Big Lie of a Stolen Election
New research shows how racist beliefs enable lies about voter fraud to spread.
www.brennancenter.org
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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.
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
The president’s latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.
www.theatlantic.com
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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
Reposted by Ben Saunders
Reposted by Ben Saunders
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.
Got the feedback that a potential project could be seen as too partisan (though they stress I am completely accurate in my description) and now I get to decide if I revise to "scholars agree that conservatives have...(cite, XX)" versus the current "conservatives have...(cite, XX)"
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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
“using real concerns to put reactionary political views in the mouths of people i am not actually going to speak to or give the dignity of their own voices” is a classic move for this clique
This denunciation of "elites" comes from a former New York Times columnist and current Atlantic staff writer who ventriloquizes low-income Black communities in the District instead of asking them how they actually feel about Trump's invasion. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
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Vibe policy
Vibe evidence
Vibe data
Vibe economics
Vibe "journalism"
Oh Jesus Christ.

CNN host right now asks Rep. Jamie Raskin, "We know that statistics show crime is down in DC. But does it 'feel' like crime is down?"

Raskin: "Oh, definitely, if you compare it to other periods in DC." (He grew up there, and knows.) But obvs still a problem.

FYI it's Kasie Hunt.
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#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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Statistical critique of the p-curve (in JASA)

#psychscisky
#socialpsych
#cogpsych
Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?
Cover page for the manuscript: Morey, R. D., & Davis-Stober, C. P. (2025). On the poor statistical properties of the P-curve meta-analytic procedure. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2025.2544397 Abstract for the paper: The P-curve (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014; Simonsohn, Simmons, & Nelson, 2015) is a widely-used suite of meta-analytic tests advertised for detecting problems in sets of studies. They are based on nonparametric combinations of p values (e.g., Marden, 1985) across significant (p < .05) studies and are variously claimed to detect “evidential value”, “lack of evidential value”, and “left skew” in p values. We show that these tests do not have the properties ascribed to them. Moreover, they fail basic desiderata for tests, including admissibility and monotonicity. In light of these serious problems, we recommend against the use of the P-curve tests.
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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.
Why are Americans so afraid of crime, even as it plummets?

Because this is the second paragraph of the CBS News take on it.

SECOND PARAGRAPH starts with a “but” that defies comprehension (what does “every 25.9 seconds” mean in a nation of 320M?), but seems scary!

SECOND PARAGRAPH.
While the report included good news, a violent crime still occurred on average every 25.9 seconds in the United States last year, according to the FBI's annual Unified Crime Report