Jay Van Bavel, PhD
@jayvanbavel
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Psychology Prof @NYUPsych | author of @PowerOfUsBook & newsletter () | Director of @vanbavellab | On sabbatical
New York, NY
Joined April 2011
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
Our new preprint explains why social media creates a funhouse mirror--a distorted perception of social norms.
Because extreme voices dominate discourse on most topics, users develop a false sense of shared norms
Led by
@CRobertson500
@KareenadelRosa
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Van Gogh's starry night with the first image taken from the James Webb Telescope
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I had to teach my Introduction to Psychology class today to 300+ students from my cell phone while I was trapped in my apartment building elevator with my two young kids.
This has to go down as my most surreal and stressful teaching experience.
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We are living through an unprecedented use of the term “unprecedented”
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43% of White students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff.
All the universities making social media statements today should end legacy admissions tomorrow.
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Postscript: Why didn't I cancel my class? I don't know. It all seemed weirdly normal in the moment. Each step just seemed to logically follow the prior step.
As I type it all out, I am now deeply aware of how absurd this was. I will not be teaching in elevators in the future.
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We recently studied social media & COVID vaccine hesitancy.
Joe Rogan's Twitter followers were extremely distrustful of vaccines: only 27% of his followers planned to get vaccinated.
Amplifying conspiracies on podcasts & social media has consequences.
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New research finds that Twitter’s recommendation algorithm amplifies anger, outgroup hostility, and affective polarization
This is a good reason to ignore the recommended Tweets.
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What is your favorite thing about Twitter:
1) The outrage
2) The outrage about outrage
3) The outrage about outrage about outrage
4) The outrage about the lack of outrage
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Loyal employees are targeted by managers for exploitation. The targeting of these loyal workers is driven by the assumption that loyal works are readily willing to make personal sacrifices.
The same thing happens in reverse: workers who agree (versus refuse) to be exploited in…
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This has to be the best layover ever:
New Nobel laureate Michael Mayor was on a lecture tour in Spain when he heard the news about his Nobel Prize in Physics. Here he is in the San Sebastian airport, looking at all of the messages flooding in.
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The ability to identify and ignore bullshit is one of the most underrated and important skills of our era.
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Researchers have spent 50 yrs studying how crowds of protesters & police behave. When police use escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas — it doesn’t work.
Disproportionate force makes a peaceful protest not so peaceful.
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A meta-analysis of 97 field experiments (N = 200,000 job applicants) in 9 countries in Europe and North America finds racial
#discrimination
in every county.
USA has one of the lowest rates of discrimination, France has the highest.
(ht
@SciSocialProbs
)
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This is the most riveting academic paper I’ve ever read—the author was in a plane that was skyjacked and confined to the plane for a week and wrote about the group dynamics that unfolded during the crisis.
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I could hear one student yelling to her roommate that her professor was trapped in an elevator. Others seemed excited to give this a try.
Apparently they'd never been taught from a professor stuck in an elevator before. It would give the class a fresh new twist.
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I was able to catch the other elevator upstairs, boot up my laptop, and give the rest of the lecture from the now-seemingly-normal confines of my kitchen table.
I'm not sure how this will play out my semester teaching evaluations, but at this point of 2020, who cares anyways.
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My kids go to a public middle school in NYC where they lock up their phones for the day. This is what the school observed:
“Overall, the program has been a massive success. We are happy to share that we continue to see the benefits of using Yondr, with increased student…
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Representative samples may be overrated.
A replication of 27 survey experiments (n = 101,745) finds that convenience samples overwhelmingly produce similar findings to representative samples.
In 0 of 393 analyses were the effects in opposite directions.
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Compare the number of people wearing masks at the outdoor NYC
#BLM
protest (left) vs the indoor
#TulsaTrumpRally
(right).
These two images show the impact of partisan identity, norms, media & leadership.
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This explains the "I do my own research" crowd
Intermediate levels of scientific knowledge are associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science.
This is based on four large surveys, spanning 30 years in Europe and the United States and does not rely on…
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City University of New York system propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined
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My daughter and I made some halloween 🎃 treats as a tribute to Phineas Gage—the most important lesion patient in the history of
#neuroscience
.
He survived an accident in which a large iron rod shot through his frontal lobe and impaired his emotional & social capacity.
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This amazing graphic shows most of the cognitive biases and organizes them into themes.
But from the lens of evolution, if a cognitive bias increased fitness it it a not a design flaw, but a design feature
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By this point, a certain level of camaraderie had developed in the elevator.
We had a dawning recognition that were all in this together and would pull through.
I reminisced about the time I was stuck in the elevator with Jack 5 years ago and we laughed about those old times!
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The rise and fall of rationality
After the year 1850, the use of words associated with fact-based (vs. emotional) arguments rose steadily in books and the
@nytimes
But the pattern reversed in the 1980s, and emotion-based arguments accelerated around 2007.
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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It’s a favorite among Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. It is a thriving multimillion dollar industry. And as any psychologist will tell you, it’s bullshit.
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Then I just started talking about consciousness and it went surprisingly well for stressed out guy giving a lecture over his phone with no notes while trapped in an elevator with his kids.
Sure, I lowered my standards. But I felt it was only fair under the circumstances.
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What happened around the year 2000 that dramatically altered youth culture?
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For context, I'm teaching a huge Intro Psych class this fall. It's totally remote and was massively overenrolled so I'm. trying to teach 360 students from around the world in the pandemic.
But others have it worse and the students are great so it's been fun thus far.
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A few weeks ago, I co-wrote an article about how our current work expectations need to be changed to reflect the stress of teaching during the pandemic.
And that was *before* I was stuck teaching my class while trapped in an elevator with my kids. It just gets worse and worse.
This. Is. Not. Normal.
In
@scicareersltys
we think academia needs a reality check. Many of us are feeling overwhelmed and things should not proceed as normal. Here are a few things you, and your school should do, to help people cope during the pandemic.
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Cards for scientists from the non-scientist relatives...
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A good reminder that our current life is just one of many paths we could have pursued, and there are still many potential paths ahead. (via
@waitbutwhy
)
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I was finally able to phone into my class. I could see there were over 200 students already in the room and they were just chatting, speculating about my new life in the elevator.
They seemed strangely relaxed. Their lives seemed somehow fuller than our life in the elevator.
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Data fraud is often framed as a victimless crime--or else the perpetrators frame themselves as the victim.
But the true victims are often graduate students who struggle to replicate a prominent study, face professional ostracism, and their only recourse is to leave the field or…
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The first problem is that the local schools are closed and I have limited child care.
So I have to get my kids from day care at 3pm and race back to my apartment by 3:30pm. My son crashes my course and likes to share his thoughts, but the students find it funny so I don't mind.
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Thankfully, I managed to login and send out an email announcement to the class by 3:28pm.
The subject line: "Trapped in my elevator, will start class as soon as I’m rescued"
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Philosopher writes paper
Same philosopher writes rebuttal to his own paper
"While there is some merit to Sauer’s arguments, he overstates the scope of his target, fails to specify a cut off for when it applies, and underestimates the power of the epistemic selection mechanisms"
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Colleges have fled standardized tests, on the theory that they hurt diversity. That’s not what the research shows.
“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history”
An excellent article on The Misguided War on the…
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75% of scientists are burned out and pulling back on conferences, peer review, committee membership, etc
When scientists set boundaries, it not only improves their own personal well-being, but also creates norms that limits are acceptable and healthy
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The psych jokes in the New Yorker are getting really obscure
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As I'm talking, I realized my kids are just staring at me with perplexed looks on their faces.
They weren't horrified, but seemed almost confused by what was transpiring as I raised my voice to explain how we have many mental processes that operate outside our awareness.
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I was promoted to full professor this week, which means I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my incredibly talented students & collaborators, because I have never, not once, published any academic papers or books on my own.
Here is to many more years of collaborating with friends!
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But I spoke. They kept talking. I yelled my name. They heard and recognized me. The class was afoot!
I could hear their collective surprise--especially once they realized I was still trapped in the elevator and the class was still going forward.
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New York City has had almost a month of
#BLM
protests and our COVID19 cases have continued to plummet.
This is a real testament to wearing masks + staying outside during collective action.
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College admission essay content has a stronger correlation with household income (R2 = 16%) than SAT scores.
This explains how removing standardized tests can increase inequality.
Based on 240,000 admission essays to the University of California.
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I'm now texting people to figure out what to do. My daughter (8 years old) starts getting scared. My son (10 years) starts teasing her about overreaching. She starts crying.
Things were melting down pretty good at that point. But we rallied and calmed down.
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As the elevator closes and starts moving up, it lurches to a halt and starts dropping. I got that feeling in my stomach that happens when you are in a roller coaster and it starts falling.
Then it stops moving completely.
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Reducing prestige bias in
#science
:
Single-blind reviewers are significantly more likely than their double-blind counterparts to recommend for acceptance papers from famous authors, top universities, and top companies.
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We have a new paper on
how policy makers, the media, and the public can use social & behavioural science to support
#COVID19
#coronavirus
pandemic response.
The paper was written by 36 authors from around the world with relevant expertise.
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After about 50-excruciatingly-long-minutes in the elevator, it jolted and then started to move.
The doors opened. We could see our beautiful nondescript lobby and the sun beaming in from the front doors.
We cautiously stepped out into freedom.
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Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement?
A meta-analysis (63 studies, N=97,672), found major flaws in study design, analysis & reporting
The overall effect (d=.05) was nonsignificant after correcting for publication bias!
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Republicans estimate that 32% of Democrats are LGBT when in reality it is 6%; Democrats estimate that 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000/year when in reality it is 2%
Political sectarianism produces prejudice, discrimination and cognitive distortion.
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Today, I set up my computer, raced to get my kids, and then we got back to my apartment at 3:20pm. Class starts at 3:30pm.
We hopped in the elevator and i breathed a sigh of relief that I was going to make it to my class on time.
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These polls reveal the power of partisanship:
—57% of Republicans think the 170,000+ deaths from
#COVID19
are acceptable (vs 10% of Democrats)
—75% of Republicans think the country is better off, in the midst of a pandemic and recession, than 4 years ago (vs 33% of all voters)
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I desperately tried to get enough internet access to login into NYU Classes and access my zoom link.
But zoom made this incredibly hard on my phone. They needed me to download an app and then login. In many ways, this was the biggest challenge of the entire ordeal.
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People with the strongest opposition to scientific consensus have the lowest levels of objective knowledge--yet they also have the most confidence.
The people who speak with the most certainly against scientists are the least trustworthy and self-aware :(
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But time passed. The kids got anxious. And I started to worry about my poor students and how I would manage to finish the lecture on time. The midterm is next week.
After half an hour, I made an executive decision to try and teach from the friendly confines of the elevator.
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40% of people admitted they would be willing to share conspiracy theories that they know to be untrue.
Why?
Because they want to share information that will boost their social engagement. You can’t fix misinformation if you ignore social motives.
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Then it dawned on me that I had no way of showing them my carefully crafted slides on the conscious and unconscious mind. They were on my computer. In my apartment.
I suddenly felt very alone. Would I be able to remember the lecture? Had I made a mistake by jumping on the call?
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I spent last evening with leading experts on standardized tests—they were originally designed to improve educational opportunities for poor kids and if you removed them from admissions, you would destroy 1/3 of the variance in social mobility.
As someone who was very good at standardized tests growing up I think they are a terrible measurement of anything other than whether you are good at the test. Certainly have nothing to do with human worth, character or virtue.
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This tragedy led to a beautiful tribute:
After PhD student Yiran Fan was shot and killed in January, his professors at the University of Chicago found 2 polished papers in his dropbox. defended his dissertation, and will present Fan's PhD to his parents.
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People express hatred because it is connected to their sense of morality.
Hate isn't the lack of morality, but the inclusion of it.
We found this pattern in several lab studies and a content analysis of hate groups
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This is a shocking video:
By tracking phones, you can see how a group of people on one beach during spring break return home and have the potential to spread
#COVID19
around a huge section of the country.
The video is also shocking because we are being monitored all the time.
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I figured my students would be worried if I didn't show up for class.
My internet reception was horrible (you know when it only has one bar of reception). I wasn't high enough to access my wifi either.
But I tried to login into my NYU Classes website to contact my students.
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Ok, no need to panic. The door won't open and the elevator won't move. But I use the call button to contact the staff from the elevator.
They promise to call a repair man from the elevator company to help us escape.
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My kids are at their school science fair and their friend Anjali (age 7) replicated the
#stroopeffect
for her project!
Please include this in all future meta-analyses (photo with permission).
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Happiness plummets in mid-life
According to an analysis if seven recent data sets, covering 51 countries and 1.3 million randomly sampled people.
The effects of the mid-life dip is comparable to major life events such as losing a spouse or employment.
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REMINDER: social media is not a representative sample.
The opinions you hear on Twitter are skewed heavily towards people with the most extreme perspectives on every issue.
These perspectives are amplified by algorithms because they maximize engagement.
Don't believe the hype.
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It’s often helpful to zoom out and look at the big picture. Don’t let a bad day distract you from all the progress you’ve made.
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New research suggests conservative politicians are more likely to be in your timeline because they are “ratioed” more often by liberals.
Online pile-ons often *backfire* because they drive more attention to the target of your anger. It often gives the target a bigger platform.
Most ratioed members of congress are Simena and Manchin, but next 18 are all Republicans! From our new
@CSMaP
piece at
@washingtonpost
&
@monkeycageblog
:
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The 4 dark laws of online engagement:
1. Negativity bias drives headline clicks
2. Extreme opinions drive in-group sharing
3. Out-group animosity drives engagement
4. "Moral-emotional" language goes viral
I discuss our research on the dark side of virality with
@DKThomp
…
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Eventually, I logged into my class. But the internet was so weak that I couldn't speak to the students.
So I logged out and logged in again using the phone link. I would just give the lecture over the phone without video or slides. It seemed like the only option.
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An analysis of comments from 9,000 subreddits from 6.3 million users found that people who are toxic in partisan contexts are also toxic in non-partisan contexts
People appear to overgeneralize toxic social norms they learned in partisan contexts
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How you image the trolley problem vs. how it's actually going to be:
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This analysis suggests that 1/3 of our cognitive biases are essentially just elements of the social identity approach:
We think our groups are better than other groups and use them as a reference point.
Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A new paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias.
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The
#fraud
investigation at Harvard and lawsuit from Francesca Gino is in the NYT
The article confirms that Dan Ariely is under investigation for fraud at Duke.
She claims she barely knows Ariely, he says they are good friends (they published 10 papers together)…
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