New paper out in @JCRNEWS How do consumers react to political ads that meddle in the primaries of the opposing party? In the most recent elections, Democrats did something strange.

"when opinions felt more linked to identity, people were more likely to choose candidates with extreme views than those with moderate views." - @MAHusseinLab, Zakary L. Tormala, & S. Christian Wheeler https://t.co/juQwQAJH9U

New #SPSPblog: Why Do People Prefer Extreme Political Candidates? by @MAHusseinLab, Zakary L. Tormala, & S. Christian Wheeler https://t.co/oT02lTUTKF

Check out some fantastic new research from @RobbWiller 's lab led by @jonasp_schone!

🚨 Call for PostDoc or Visiting PhD Student 🚨 We're seeking an American Politics scholar of leg. institutions or representation, under the direction of Jim Curry, Jeff Harden, and Rachel Porter (me!), affiliated with our Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab

Curious about the digital twin dataset and how the digital twins were created? Read more here:

Your responses will help inform how people perceive the potential (and limitations) of digital twins in simulating human judgement and decision-making.

Before making the results public, we are conducting a quick survey. We want to know how YOU predict humans and their digital twins performed. Take the survey here:

👬 A Digital Twin Mega-Study! Researchers at Columbia University asked both humans and their “digital twins" to complete the same set of tasks. How closely did digital twins mirror their human counterparts?

Very astute piece by @anniekarni on how Democrats are embracing working-class candidates. My research lab has multiple ongoing projects on this very idea, so stay tuned for some empirical data coming soon! https://t.co/CvJiJLcgQk

Datadog is one of the largest infrastructure success stories of the last decade. Now they’re betting on AI: a SOTA in-house time series model, observability for AI, and more. I talked to Datadog CEO @oliveur about Datadog’s AI strategy and where he thinks things are going:

The paper is now out, and you can read it here: https://t.co/Xp715iHlDh This is joint work with Zak Tormala and Christian Wheeler at Stanford.

We see the DV of choice of extreme candidates as an understudied one in psychology. I hope we see more research on it. We also think that studying how people assess whether a candidate is extreme or moderate would be an exciting future direction.

This effect was robust to … different descriptions of extreme candidates 👉different issues 👉controlling for other attitude dimensions (e.g., certainty, importance, moralization, knowledge). 👉Different methods (e.g., conjoint, vignettes, human-LLM interactions)

Is this just about group identity? Unlikely. In another study, we used LLMs. They either prompted Ps to reflect on their views, or to connect those views to their identity. When views were tied to identity, attitudes grew more extreme and so did support for extreme candidates.

The effect held even on issues people knew nothing about. Saying John has a view on abortion doesn’t tell you if he’s pro-life or -choice. So we made up an issue (“Prop DW”). Party had/no stance. That alone made it feel identity-relevant, pushing ppl to more extreme candidates.

In a Conjoint study, we had people choose between different candidates (different ages, backgrounds, views on social issues). We measured people’s identity relevance. As identity relevance increased, people became more likely to choose the candidate who is extreme.

Across six studies, we find that as people’s opinions on political issues become more part of their identity, they are drawn to extreme (vs. moderate) candidates.

What is identity relevance? It’s the degree to which your view on an issue feels like a reflection of who you are. For some, views on climate change are core to identity. For others, they may have strong views, but those views don’t define them.

Past work has focused on structural factors (e.g., primary elections, changes in supply of candidates). In a new paper, we shift the conversation to *psychological* factors. We test if the *identity relevance* of people’s attitudes cause them to choose extreme candidates.

🚨New Paper🚨 Elected officials are increasingly extreme. E.g., a recent analysis of 84,000 state-level candidates found that extreme candidates are now winning at the highest rates in 30 years. Why are people increasingly drawn to extreme candidates?