We explored the phenomenon of "political breakups," i.e. losing relationships with friends, family members, romantic partners, or others due to political differences. We studied the conditions surrounding political breakups in the United States across four datasets (combined n = 3,791) and supplemented our findings using a proxy measure from the American National Election Studies. In a survey we conducted in April 2025, we found that 37% of Americans reported having had a political breakup, mostly with friends. The prevalence of breakups in the United States appears to have increased since 2016, although evidence is limited. Across all datasets, Democrats were more likely to have experienced a breakup compared with Republicans and were usually the initiator. Political breakups were associated with increased partisan hostility, above and beyond strength of partisanship: Those who reported breakups had more negative feelings toward their political opponents (especially voters rather than party elites), perceived them as more extreme, and ascribed selfish views to them. We discuss potential causes and call for more research on this phenomenon.

A key contributor to political conflict in the United States is the different factual beliefs held by liberals and conservatives about matters such as taxes, gun violence, and climate change. We propose an account of how differential beliefs arise, describing how prescriptive beliefs (moral-based beliefs regarding how the world should be) shape descriptive ones ("factual" beliefs regarding how the world really is). Three contributing processes are identified: moralization (the infusion of issues with moral significance), factualization (the construction of pseudo-descriptive justifications for moral evaluations), and socialization (the reinforcement of morally palatable beliefs by selective exposure to ideologically sympathetic people and media sources). These normal processes of intergroup conflict have been exacerbated by technological advances and exploited by political actors interested in promoting partisan animosities for political gain. The shortest part of the chapter addresses the hardest part of the problem: what can be done to promote more civil and more rational political discourse.

This article reviews empirical data demonstrating robust ingroup favoritism in political judgment. Partisans display systematic tendencies to seek out, believe, and remember information that supports their political beliefs and affinities. However, the psychological drivers of partisan favoritism have been vigorously debated, as has its consistency with rational inference. We characterize decades-long debates over whether such tendencies violate normative standards of rationality, focusing on the phenomenon of motivated reasoning. In light of evidence that both motivational and cognitive factors contribute to partisan bias, we advocate for a descriptive approach to partisan bias research. Rather than adjudicating the (ir)rationality of partisan favoritism, future research should prioritize the identification and measurement of its predictors and clarify the cognitive mechanisms underlying motivated political reasoning. Ultimately, we argue that political judgment is best evaluated by a standard of ecological rationality based on its practical implications for individual well-being and functional democratic governance.

Despite decades of research, it has been difficult to resolve debates about the existence andnature of partisan bias—the tendency to evaluate information more positively when it supports, rather than challenges, one’s political views. Whether partisans display partisan biases, and whether any such biases reflect motivated reasoning, remains contested. We conducted four studies (total N = 4,010) in which participants who made unblinded evaluations of politically- relevant science were compared to participants who made blinded evaluations of the same study. The blinded evaluations—judgments of a study’s quality given before knowing whether its results were politically-congenial—served as impartial benchmarks against which unblinded participants’ potentially biased evaluations were compared. We also modeled the influence of partisans’ preferences and prior beliefs to test accounts of partisan judgment more stringently than past research. Across our studies, we found evidence of politically motivated reasoning, as unblinded partisans’ preferences and prior beliefs independently biased their evaluations. We contend that conceptual confusion between descriptive and normative (e.g., Bayesian) models of political cognition has impeded the resolution of longstanding theoretical debates, and we discuss how our results may help advance more integrative theorizing. We also consider how the blinding paradigm can help researchers address further theoretical disputes (e.g., whether liberals and conservatives are similarly biased), and we discuss the implications of our results for addressing partisan biases within and beyond social science.

Science is among humanity’s greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

Understanding population‐level variability in responses to pathogens over time is important for developing effective health‐based messages targeted at ideologically diverse populations. Research from psychological and political sciences suggests that party and elite cues shape how people respond to major threats like climate change. Research on responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic suggests similar variability across party identities; however, prior work has methodological limitations. This prospective, longitudinal study of a large probability‐based nationally representative U.S. sample assessed in March–April 2020 (N = 6,514) and then 6 months later in September–October 2020 (N = 5,661) demonstrates that COVID‐19 fear, perceived COVID‐19 death risk, and reported health‐protective behaviors became increasingly polarized over the first 6 months of the pandemic. Initial differences between Democrats and Republicans failed to converge over time and became more pronounced. Responses among Republicans were further polarized by support for former President Donald Trump: Trump Republicans initially reported weaker responses to COVID‐19 than non‐Trump Republicans, and these differences became more pronounced over time. Importantly, political identity and Trump support were not linked to perceived infection risk of a nonpoliticized pathogen, the flu. Finally, political identity and Republican Trump support prospectively predicted COVID‐19 vaccine intentions 6 months into the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created enormously difficult decisions for individuals trying to navigate both the risks of the pandemic and the demands of everyday life. Good decision making in such scenarios can have life and death consequences. For this reason, it is important to understand what drives risk assessments during a pandemic, and, in particular, to investigate the ways that these assessments might deviate from ideal risk assessments. Two studies (N = 841) investigate risk judgments related to COVID-19. The results indicate that risk judgments are sensitive to factors unrelated to the objective risks of infection. In particular, activities that are morally justified are perceived as safer while those that might subject people to blame, or culpability, are seen as riskier.

Recent studies suggest climate change consensus messages may cause psychological reactance for conservatives. However, it remains unknown how much this reactance impacts the effectiveness of consensus messaging. Using data from a recent meta-analysis on climate change interventions, the current paper seeks to add context to the debate over reactance. We integrated data from 20 experiments (N = 19,200 participants) that test how consensus messages (compared to a control condition) impact climate change attitudes. The effect of consensus messages on attitudes was small yet statistically significant and positive (g = 0.09), and not significantly moderated by political affiliation. Moreover, the moderating role of political affiliation was similar for consensus messages compared to other interventions for climate change attitudes. While conservatives may experience resistance to consensus messages, there is little meta-analytic evidence that consensus messages backfire.

People believe that effort is valuable, but what kind of value does it confer? We find thatdisplays of effort signal moral character. Eight studies (N = 5,502) demonstrate the nature of these effects in the domains of paid employment, personal fitness, and charitable fundraising. The exertion of effort is deemed morally admirable (Studies 1-6) and is monetarily rewarded (Studies 2-6), even in situations where effort does not directly generate additional product, quality, or economic value. Convergent patterns of results emerged in South Korean and French cross-cultural replications (Studies 2b-c). We contend that the seeming irrationality of valuing effort for its own sake, such as in situations where one’s efforts do not directly increase economic output (Studies 3-6), reveals a “deeply rational” social heuristic for evaluating potential cooperation partners. Specifically, effort cues engender broad moral trait ascriptions, and this moralization of effort influences donation behaviors (Study 5) and cooperative partner choice decision-making (Studies 4 and 6). In situating our account of effort moralization into past research and theorizing, we also consider the implications of these effects for social welfare policy and the future of work.

The contribution of Bernstein et al reports a series of studies demonstrating partisan bias: the tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one’s political beliefs or allegiances than when it challenges those beliefs or allegiances. The write-up is clear and concise, and the studies are interesting with a number of nice empirical touches, but the novelty and quality of the data need to be considered, especially the difficulty of ruling out rational counter explanations for data ostensibly showing motivated partisan bias.

We extend the target authors' moral disciplining theory (MDT) by discussing signaling, proscriptive and prescriptive morality, and the dynamics by which signaling may operate in tandem with proscriptive and prescriptive forms of moral disciplining. We also suggest that MDT can help explain challenges to economic and social progress by revealing fundamental tensions between puritanical intuitions and liberal ideals.

During a contentious primary campaign, people may argue passionately against a candidate they later support during the general election. How do people reconcile such potentially conflicting attitudes? This study followed 602 United States citizens, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, at three points throughout the 2016 presidential election investigating how attitudes and preferences changed over time and how people remembered their past feelings. Across political parties, people’s memory for their past attitudes was strongly influenced by their present attitudes; more specifically, those who had changed their opinion of a candidate remembered their past attitudes as being more like their current attitudes than they actually were. Participants were also susceptible to remembering false news events about both presidential candidates. However, they were largely unaware of their memory biases and rejected the possibility that they may have been susceptible to them. Not remembering their prior attitude may facilitate support of a previously disliked candidate and foster loyalty towards a party nominee during a time of disunity by forgetting they ever used to dislike the candidate.

Schadenfreude and sympathy are often experienced at the intergroup level; however, little research has been conducted to examine their role in one of the most prominent and emotionally evocative intergroup contexts: the political arena. In this study, we assessed a sample of 506 Americans??? (Age M = 41.69 years, SD = 13.94; 57% women) schadenfreude and sympathy (and related cognitions) in response to then-President Trump???s COVID-19 diagnosis (a salient misfortune of a contentious political figure), and how their schadenfreude, sympathy, and related cognitions were associated with shifts in voting intentions (own and public???s) in the 2020 Presidential Election. We also examined trends in, and associations between, these variables by political affiliation (focusing on Democrats and Republicans) and gender (focusing on men and women). Unsurprisingly, compared to Republicans, Democrats expressed more schadenfreude and less sympathy. Contrary to previous research, however, Democrats??? experiences of schadenfreude were tempered and were primarily driven by deservingness beliefs rather than intergroup competition or malice). Amongst Republicans only, men experienced stronger schadenfreude than women. Regarding voting intentions, participants were more likely to report that the diagnosis would impact shifts in the public???s voting than their own voting, primarily in favor of the Democratic Party. Feelings of schadenfreude and sympathy were not significantly associated with anticipated shifts???rather, those who believed then-President Trump???s diagnosis was deserved (cognition strongly associated with schadenfreude) were four times more likely to believe the public would change their vote to the Democratic Party. These findings are discussed in relation to research at the intersection of psychology and political science and have implications for politicians and psychologists who aim to understand emotions underlying partisanship and voting behavior.

In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) contended that the rise of “safetyism” within American society has inspired beliefs and practices that hinder college students’ socioemotional development. One of their most controversial claims was that college students’ safetyism-inspired beliefs (e.g., emotional pain or discomfort is dangerous) are rooted in and supported by cognitive distortions, or negatively biased patterns of thought (e.g., emotional reasoning). Citing evocative anecdotes, they argued that such distortions emerge in students’ perceptions of offensive or ideologically-challenging experiences as disproportionately harmful or traumatic. However, no empirical work has substantiated an association between cognitive distortions and safetyism-inspired beliefs or practices. In a large (N = 786), ethnically and economically diverse sample of college students, we conducted the first examination of the relationship between these variables. Aligning with Lukianoff and Haidt’s assertions, we found that students’ self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions positively predicted their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and support for the broad use of trigger warnings. Considering our exploratory results, we argue that greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted.

Alcohol intoxication is a prevalent feature of university life and campus sexual assault cases. While previous research has examined how students perceive obvious cases of assault, less is known about how students evaluate more ambiguous sexual scenarios-such as those including two intoxicated individuals. In three survey experiments with college students (N = 990), we examined how manipulating the intoxication (sober vs. drunk) of a man accused of assault (the respondent) influenced perceptions of a hook-up scenario involving an intoxicated woman. Although university policies indicate that respondent intoxication should not influence evaluations of these scenarios, we hypothesized that students would be influenced by cues of respondent intoxication when making judgments of the hook-up and the individuals involved. Students reported that the hook-up was a sexual assault more often when the respondent was sober compared to when he was drunk, and they found sober respondents more responsible for the encounter than drunk respondents. Although effect sizes fluctuated across studies, an internal meta-analysis found evidence of significant (but modest) aggregate effects. Furthermore, perceptions of the respondent's agency mediated the effects of intoxication on perceptions of respondent responsibility (Studies 2 & 3). We also manipulated whether the respondent should have reasonably known the complainant was drunk (Studies 1 & 2) and whether the complainant or the complainant's friend reported the incident (Study 3), but these manipulations had little effect on students' perceptions of the vignettes. We discuss how our findings can guide future research and consider implications of our results for university stakeholders.

Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial information more readily than politically uncongenial information). In the follow-up survey two weeks later, however, we found both high levels of belief in the articles and the re-emergence of a partisan congruency effect in all warning conditions, even though participants had known just two weeks ago the items were false. The new pre-warning before the headline showed some small improvements over other types, but did not stop people from believing the article once seen again without a warning. This finding suggests that warnings do have an important immediate impact and may work well in the short term, though the durability of that protection is limited.

Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that "the people" have been treated unfairly by "the elite". In this chapter, we propose a social psychological analysis of grievance that explores its role in political mobilization, moral judgment, and intergroup conflict. In judging the morality of an act, one can focus on the present (whether the act itself is morally acceptable or deontological intuitions), the future (whether the act can be justified by its future consequences or utilitarian intuitions), or the past (whether the act can be justified as redress of past grievances or moral accounting intuitions). Evoking past grievance moralizes politics, which has been shown effective in mobilizing political action, but can have collateral costs to democratic norms and political civility. Aggrieved people and groups are more likely to see past injustice as morally relevant and justify undemocratic behavior as morally acceptable "payback" for that injustice. Over time, grievance-based political strategies escalate conflict by creating a rising standard for what counts as immoral behavior (increasing the likelihood of morally questionable behavior in the future) and provoking a self-reinforcing cycle of disproportionate responding. The use of grievance-related themes in populist political rhetoric is discussed.

Studies have demonstrated students' resistance to active learning, despite evidence illustrating that their learning is improved relative to students in lectures. Specifically, while active learning and group work are effective at engaging students in their learning process, studies report that students' perceptions of active learning approaches are not always positive. What remains underexplored is whether students' perceptions of active learning improve with effective instructor facilitation and whether there exists differential perceptions between racially minoritized students and represented students. Here, we estimate students' perceptions of effective instructor facilitation as the mediator in the relationship between active learning and perceptions of learning and perceived utility for class activities (task value). Then, we examine differences by racial identification. We collected classroom observation data to empirically categorize courses as active learning or lecture-based and surveyed 4,257 college students across 25 STEM classrooms at a research-intensive university. We first examined the relationship between active learning on student perceptions and found a negative relationship between active learning and perceptions of learning and task value for both racially minoritized students and represented students. Next, we assessed whether students' perceptions of instructor effectiveness in facilitating group activities mediate these negative relationships. We found that, on average, students of all races were more likely to positively perceive instructor facilitation in active learning classes relative to lectures. In turn, the positive perceptions of instructor facilitation partially suppressed the negative relationship between active learning and perceptions of learning and task value. These results demonstrate that effective instructor facilitation can influence both students' self-assessment of learning and perceived utility of the learning activities, and underscores the importance of developing pedagogical competence among college instructors.

Researchers interested in climate change communication have investigated how people respond to messages about it. Through meta-analysis, the current research synthesizes the multitude of experimental studies on this topic to uncover which interventions are most effective at influencing attitudes about climate change. The meta-analysis focuses on experimental studies that included a control condition and measured climate change attitudes among participants in the United States. After a large literature search, 396 effect sizes were retrieved from 76 independent experiments (N = 76,054 participants). Intervention had a small, significant positive effect on attitudes, g = 0.08, 95% CI [0.06, 0.10], p < .001. Surprisingly, type of intervention was not a statistically significant moderator of this effect, nor was political affiliation. However, type of attitude was a significant moderator: the treatment-control difference in attitudes was smaller for policy support than for belief in climate change, indicating that policy attitudes are more resistant to influence than belief in climate change. Other moderators and publication bias were also tested. We conclude with policy implications and recommendations for future research.

The current study investigates how people respond to a climate science consensus statement embedded within a news article. Participants ( N = 1,048) were randomly assigned to read a news article about climate change, read the same article with a scientific consensus message included, read a simple consensus statement, or a control condition. Participants in consensus conditions had increased perceptions of scientific agreement compared with those who did not receive consensus information. Moreover, the article was similarly effective as an overt consensus statement. However, neither consensus statement affected other climate change attitudes, suggesting the effect may be limited to consensus perceptions.