Am 14. September gibt es in Bochum eine Abendrevue zu Verschwörungserzählungen, die ich mit Pia LAmberty und Lote Pummerer gestalte unter Mitwirkung von Tobias Rothmund und Sekten-Info NRW. Tickets sind begrenzt und unter dem Link bestellbar.

Das NDR-Magazin ZAPP hat sich mit dem Fall Muhammad al Muhammad beschäftigt, einem syrischen Geflüchteten, der in einem Akt von Zivilcourage einen Messerangriff unterband -- und sich anschließend Diffamierungen und Verschwörungstheorien ausgesetzt sah.

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 ."The Psychology of Conspiracy Mentality". In this overview chapter, accepted at Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, I review what we know about conspiracy mentality as an individual difference

RT @easpinfo: We do not use this account anymore but you can connect with us on LinkedIn:

@_Hans_Alves_ The paper is 50-day #openaccess until Feb 18: Better save your pdf. After an 11-year odyssey (entirely on us and our priorities) this paper has finally found a home and we can finally give an answer to the question reviewers asked back then: Why ideology?.

@_Hans_Alves_ And indeed, manipulating the best strategy in an Iowa Gambling Task (in the paper) or a balloon pumping task (BART, not in the paper) changed who participants trusted more to delegate their decision to. In high-risk environments, they choose more conservative people.

@_Hans_Alves_ Our reasoning was that the beliefs dimension taps into stereotypes, whether people of the sort would rather exploit (conservative) or explore (progressive). Thus, creating environments in which either of the two is more beneficial should create different delegation preferences.

@_Hans_Alves_ And we found it: we connected it to basic tendencies of exploration vs. exploitation. In lush conditions, it is safe to exploit and feed off the oversupply. In dire conditions, it seems advisable to seek new shores, a better life, to explore.

@_Hans_Alves_ That seemed like a very Western, modern, potentially even short-lived characteristic to care about. So, that was the puzzle: Why (ideological) beliefs? The “beeline” was born! We tried to come up with something at least as grandiose and ancient as friend or foe.

@_Hans_Alves_ Trying to publish this, we faced many hurdles, but a major one was: But why? Why SHOULD people care about beliefs? The sexiness of the warmth primacy idea is that it resonates: sure, I want to know whether someone’s friend or foe. But ideology?

@_Hans_Alves_ Our first data suggested that people sorted the social groups others had generated on the two dimensions of agency/status and ideological beliefs, but not on warmth. We collected and analyzed data like maniacs, but the pattern always remained.

@_Hans_Alves_ Early 2014, Alex Koch and I got together to combine my interest in putting relevant content dimensions of stereotypes to a data-driven test with Alex’s recently developed spatial arrangement tool.

🚨 New Paper alert! 🚨 Koch, Dotsch, Imhoff, Unkelbach, & @_hans_alves_ (2025). Ideological beliefs as cues to exploitation-exploration behavior. @JExpSocPsy This paper has a long story to it. Sorry, but I will not spare you.

RT @SLVeriter: Are conspiracy theorists “stupid”? 🧠 In this new paper, @rolandimhoff and @TBertlich show that… well, it depends. If the the….

Do conspiracy beliefs result from a lack of cognitive sophistication to understand that they are bullshit? In a new comment, Tisa Bertlich and I argue that the available evidence is biased by an exclusive focus on factually wrong conspiracy theories.

Evaluative priming tasks frequently assume that averaging across faces of a race will provide a good measure of race evaluation. Manuel Becker argues that faces have many more features that might play a role. Osthofen #facemeeting

Jeff Sherman explains how application of category information is ambiguous as to whether category cue is used more, person cue is used less, both or a mix. Proposed multinomial processing trees as a formal solution. Osthofen #facemeeting

Kurt Hugenberg asks whether individual prejudice affects mental representations of facial trustworthiness. Gender and Race prototypicality might be baked in into how white people construe facial trustworthiness Day 3 of Osthofen #facemeeting

Ipek Oruc brings welcome vision science expertise to Osthofen #facemeeting. The "Face diet" method records all faces people encounter during their waking hours. People do see more own-race faces in their environment - limited other-race exposure is associated with increased ORE.

. in fact: it holds literally across the globe that the same facial features useful to distinguish individuals within one "race" are highly correlated (read: virtually identical) for other "races".