I was trained in Social Psych and now I'm very happy here. If you (as a student or mentor) have questions about life across disciplines, feel free to reach out. 3/3

And it's not just me and Ingrid. As I say every year, we have 6 faculty with explicit interest in political psych and an unknown number of faculty with secret interest in it.

So when I say "political psych" I mean that very broadly. 2/3

Pre-Print: osf.io/preprints/ps...

We thought partisans would *punish* in-party apologies. Instead we found that apologies & denials of wrongdoing worked equally w/ in-partisans. So we think partisans "enable" rather than "incentivize" denials of wrongdoing. (Posted this when it first came out online but re-upping)

Replacing "Best wishes [etc]," with "Tomorrow comes,"

Thanks!

I’ve been hesitant to promote some “regular” work lately bc I do a lot of “polarization” research - I don’t think that’s the biggest problem in politics right now. But I think Zeenat’s project gets at *the* problem of democratic erosion, and I’m very grateful and proud to be a part of this work.

So pointing out when politicians violate democratic norms might reduce support for them – a little bit. But changing vote intentions (even in our hypothetical scenarios) was hard, and in the real world – where these “call-outs” will be contested – it’ll be much harder.

Here’s the figure from the more representative study. Interaction wasn’t significant, but you can see each treatment made some difference on its own, but they didn’t add together nicely. We think both made violations more salient.

If Ps just don’t notice democratic violations, maybe pointing them out when Ps read about them will make them salient and reduce support for those politicians (“This policy is inconsistent with the principle that people should be allowed to protest in groups!”). This worked - small effect.

Our students were unwilling to vote for those politicians too (phew). Ps in our nat’l sample, though, were at best “not sure” how they’d vote, and unwilling to vote against the in-party. So we did see some willingness to choose party over democracy. Could we reduce that?

Plus, we find strong beliefs that things like civil liberties and rule of law are important to a democracy and that the U.S. should be a democracy. Among both Dem and Rep participants, in both samples. Also, Ps consistently disapproved of undemocratic policies/behavior.

If Ps don’t know what “counts” as democratic, having Ps articulate their principles pre-judgment should give them clearer evaluative standards and reduce support. Principles reported post-judgment should be weaker, to rationalize their support for in-party violators. Neither happened (consistently).

Participants (Ps) read about hypothetical in-party senators who each violated some fundamental democratic principle (e.g., free assembly, free press, rule of law). We recruited two samples (one student, one demographically representative of American partisans by age/race/gender).