newsletter: february 2025
february is here! meet this month's guest editor, Stephanie Tepper
hi, it’s ivy!
✧₊・🦢˚₊♡❣️ happy february ❣️♡₊˚ 🦢・₊✧
I’m so thrilled to introduce our february guest editor, stephanie tepper!
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….want to be a guest editor for an upcoming newsletter?
shoot us an email, sign up via this google form, or DM us on twitter & we’ll tell you more!!
p.s. be on the lookout (via the whova app) for our marginalia meetup at SPSP 2025 in denver!
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Stephanie Tepper 🏳️🌈🎂 🌚🌷🐶
about me I currently live in Durham, NC and work as a Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the federal government. I moved here in July, just over a year after finishing my social psych Ph.D. at Cornell in 2023. This is my second time living in the Triangle area of NC (I went to undergrad here and stayed for a few years after finishing) and I am super excited to be back. It’s a lovely place with great nature, amazing food, and lots of ways to find community.
In my work at the Office of Evaluation Sciences, we use social and behavioral science to improve how the government serves the public. This involves developing interventions and conducting field experiments and quasi-experimental studies to evaluate the impact of those interventions. I work on projects related to improving people’s access to government benefits and services, promoting economic opportunity for small businesses, and more. It’s an exciting application of (but also very different from!) my academic work during grad school, where I studied how people think about and respond to social and economic inequality. I’m finding it really gratifying to be doing applied work with direct impact that also has a focus on rigor and transparency. I have learned so much getting to collaborate with researchers from different disciplines who share an excitement about bringing evidence into government and policy. I think that psychologists and other social scientists can bring a lot of value to the government, especially in threatening times, so if you’re reading this and wondering if you might like this type of work, I’m always up for sharing more about my experience.
Outside of research, I like to bake (I’ve been on a sourdough journey), knit (and experiment with other fiber arts), play music with friends (I play drums and a couple other instruments), connect with fellow queer people, and hang out with my dog. I also joined a powerlifting gym this past fall and am finding it extremely fun and empowering, despite being a person who dreaded gym class as a child.
here’s what i’ve been reading and watching and thinking about this month:
📺 WATCHING 👀
severance I watched season one last year and it was some of the best television I’ve ever seen. I plan to start the new season as soon as there are a few episodes out so I don’t have to deal with cliffhangers!!
drag race the world is heavy right now and we all need our coping shows…I am catching up on some seasons I missed and also re-watching some old faves for comfort.
📚READING 🤓
Again in the spirit of comfort and escapism, some fiction I’ve loved recently: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Becky Chambers), & Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Rufi Thorpe)
👂LISTENING 🎧
My top albums of 2024 were Cowboy Carter and Brat so nothing revolutionary over here honestly!
💻 PAPERS I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT 👇
This set of studies and overall impactful and fascinating body of work (by my friend/cohort-mate Mikaela Spruill and grad advisor Neil Lewis, Jr.!) at the intersection of JDM and law:
Legal descriptions of police officers affect how citizens judge them
Mikaela Spruill & Neil A. Lewis, Jr. | JESP (2022)
How does legal terminology affect our mental representations of police officers? In two experiments (N = 2001) with jury-eligible Americans, we examined the dual influence of social stratification and legal language on how Americans form judgments of police officers. We manipulated descriptions of officers—using laymen's terms or legal terms—and assessed how those descriptions differentially affected Americans' conceptions of officers. Officers described as “objectively reasonable” (a legal term) were judged less negatively and perceived as warmer and more competent than “average” officers or just “officers.” Further, effects of legal language were moderated by race and neighborhood context, consistent with racialized experiences in a stratified nation. Specifically, the priors of Black and white Americans in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas differ significantly at baseline (i.e., in the control condition), but are brought in alignment—in favor of officers—when officers are described as “objectively reasonable.” We discuss the implications of these processes for both psychological theory and legal practice.
This paper on average effect sizes of nudges and interventions at scale - selfishly this is cool because it highlights the work of my office, but also, it provides some really valuable evidence on what kinds of effect sizes we can expect from large-scale field experiments:
RCTS to scale: Comprehensive evidence from two nudge units
Stefano DellaVigna & Elizabeth Linos | National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper (2020)
Nudge interventions have quickly expanded from academic studies to larger implementation in so-called Nudge Units in governments. This provides an opportunity to compare interventions in research studies, versus at scale. We assemble a unique data set of 126 RCTs covering over 23 million individuals, including all trials run by two of the largest Nudge Units in the United States. We compare these trials to a sample of nudge trials published in academic journals from two recent meta-analyses. In papers published in academic journals, the average impact of a nudge is very large – an 8.7 percentage point take-up effect, a 33.5% increase over the average control. In the Nudge Unit trials, the average impact is still sizable and highly statistically significant, but smaller at 1.4 percentage points, an 8.1% increase. We consider five potential channels for this gap: statistical power, selective publication, academic involvement, differences in trial features and in nudge features. Publication bias in the academic journals, exacerbated by low statistical power, can account for the full difference in effect sizes. Academic involvement does not account for the difference. Different features of the nudges, such as in-person versus letter-based communication, likely reflecting institutional constraints, can partially explain the different effect sizes. We conjecture that larger sample sizes and institutional constraints, which play an important role in our setting, are relevant in other at-scale implementations. Finally, we compare these results to the predictions of academics and practitioners. Most forecasters overestimate the impact for the Nudge Unit interventions, though nudge practitioners are almost perfectly calibrated.
💎 💎 awesome work by stephanie 💎 💎
Stephanie J. Tepper & Thomas Gilovich
JPSP (2024)
Stephanie J. Tepper, Mikaela Spruill, Bharathy Premachandra & Neil A. Lewis, Jr.
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (2022)
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in support & science,
📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚
eliana hadjiandreou
ivy gilbert
jordan wylie
minjae kim
THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩
💎 awesome work by marginalia and affiliated scientists 💎
The psychology of state punishment
Jordan Wylie, Connie P. Y. Chiu, Nicolette M. Dakin, William Cunningham & Ana Gantman | European Journal of Social Psychology (in press)
A significant amount of punishment that happens in society is state punishment–that is, third-party punishment carried out by an organized political community in response to a rule violation. We argue that a complete psychology of punishment must consider state punishment as a distinct form. State punishment is a unique type of punishment because it is a special case of third-party punishment, pre-specified to occur after the violation of official rules and policies, carried out by people acting on behalf of a nation or government. State punishment, especially as compared to interpersonal punishment, is regarded as a legitimate form of violence, which communicates not just disapproval, but information about procedures and power. Moreover, state punishment is made possible by state rules, which, unlike norms, are formalized, can be fully articulated, and are perfectly transmissible across generations. We end the paper with implications for the psychology of punishment more broadly, and future directions for better understanding the unique psychology of state punishment.
An active inference model of the optimism bias
Elizabeth L. Fisher, Christopher J. Whyte, & Jakob Hohwy | Computational Psychiatry (2025)
The optimism bias is a cognitive bias where individuals overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Associated with improved quality of life, optimism bias is considered to be adaptive and is a promising avenue of research for mental health interventions in conditions where individuals lack optimism such as major depressive disorder. Here we lay the groundwork for future research on optimism as an intervention by introducing a domain general formal model of optimism bias, which can be applied in different task settings. Employing the active inference framework, we propose a model of the optimism bias as high precision likelihood biased towards positive outcomes. First, we simulate how optimism may be lost during development by exposure to negative events. We then ground our model in the empirical literature by showing how the developmentally acquired differences in optimism are expressed in a belief updating task typically used to assess optimism bias. Finally, we show how optimism affects action in a modified two-armed bandit task. Our model and the simulations it affords provide a computational basis for understanding how optimism bias may emerge, how it may be expressed in standard tasks used to assess optimism, and how it affects agents’ decision-making and actions; in combination, this provides a basis for future research on optimism as a mental health intervention.
Johnathan Gallegos, Z. Ferguson, Katie McLaughlin, Tessa Dover, & Cheryl Kaiser | Psychology of Violence (2024)
Objective: Images of police violence targeting Black Americans is widely broadcasted in the media. Drawing upon theoretical and historical perspectives on vicarious trauma and social identity, we assess whether exposure to images of racialized police violence affects Black and White Americans’ cardiovascular reactivity and concerns about being victimized by police brutality. Method: Black (N = 77) and White (N = 89) Americans were exposed to view either five images of police violence targeting Black Americans or five control images depicting car-accident-related harm affecting Black Americans. Participants prepared and delivered a speech about the depictions and answered self-reported measures while their cardiovascular activity was recorded. Results: Significant Condition × Timepoint interactions demonstrated that exposure to police brutality images (as compared to control images) increased sympathetic reactivity on the pre-ejection period and heart rate during the speech delivery and heart rate during speech preparation. A significant Condition × Participant Race interaction indicated that exposure to police brutality images (as compared to control images) increased parasympathetic withdrawal (reduced respiratory sinus arrhythmia) among Black (but not White) participants. A significant Condition × Participant Race interaction revealed that police brutality images (as compared to control images) increased Black (but not White) participants’ concerns about personally being victimized by police brutality. Conclusions: Images of police violence activate stress responses for Black and White Americans, with potential disproportionate effects for Black Americans. Implications include well-being following exposure to vicarious racial trauma and consideration for how and when to share such images.
🌱 JOB-MARKET RESOURCES 🌱
no matter where you’re at right now -- offer in hand, fingers-still-crossed, looking at post-docs, exploring options outside academia -- we support you!
post-doc position at the ohio state on extremism and polarization — deadline is 2/15
post-doc in the mind & morality lab at brown starting summer 2025. Interested candidates should send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28
post-doc in emotion, morality, or collective action with paul piff
for college grads thinking about grad school: the stanford social neuroscience lab is hiring a full-time RA to begin summer 2025
the centre for the governance of AI is hiring research scholars and research fellows
university of cambridge is hiring an assistant professor specializing in social science of AI — the deadline is Feb 2!
and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!