Moved to Arkansas so I figured I’d better get a hard copy of this banger.

Absolutely delighted to announce that I will be joining
@uarkansas.bsky.social as Assistant Professor of Public Opinion in Fall 2025.

Feeling very grateful for this opportunity and excited to begin work with colleagues in political science and the Blair Center in beautiful Fayetteville!

Glad to hop on this bandwagon.

How often in 2024 did I actually improve an empty page?

We also address several caveats. Notably, we ran this study when daily cases were on the downswing and several restrictions had recently been lifted. We may have seen different results in Dec '21, when cases were surging and threat was high.

However, we also find evidence (albeit, a little patchy) that targeted messaging may have been effective at promoting compliance among disabled people. Disabled respondents report ⬆️ support for behavioral restrictions in the disability condition.

In short, we find no evidence that such appeals increased affective concern or support for behavioral measures aimed at curbing the spread, and we find some evidence of a backlash in response to messaging that cues both ethnic minority and disabled people.

We conducted a survey experiment in 2021 as part of the Welsh Election Study (WES, N=4074). We randomly assigned respondents to short vignettes emphasizing the vulnerability of ethnic minorities and people with disabilities to severe illness/death.

What did we find?

These kinds of appeals were deployed routinely by political leaders, and frequently focused on people with disabilities (PWD), who are at vastly elevated risk of severe illness and death (e.g. thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Delighted to learn that my paper with @jaclarner.bsky.social on disability and welfare attitudes in the UK is forthcoming at Political Psychology! This is my first publication and I'm thrilled its found such a great home.

Preprint: osf.io/mtb4n/

polisky behaviorsky

This is awesome.