and feel free to chat to my current grad students @kirameans.bsky.social and Heejoo Chung (not on here) to find out what it's like to work with me.

Here is our lab website: tmorgenr.wixsite.com/unicornlab

You can email me at tmorgenr(at)purdue.edu

P.S.: Am I a real social psychologist now that I've published in JPSP? 😆

18/18 Finally: All our materials and data are openly available: osf.io/xkbgh/. Studies 1 and 2a were not preregistered. For all remaining studies, we preregistered hypotheses, sample size, exclusion criteria, measures, and analytic strategy, and report deviations from the preregistrations.

17/n Our studies emphasize how such sex/gender-dependent granting of rights might be justified and psychologically and societally sustained. We hope that our work does not remain the last to shed psychological light on this topic!

16/ Many questions are of course still open and there's a bunch of limitations - but we hope that this is a useful contribution to the literature. Bodily autonomy – a core value in philosophy and human rights – seems to be granted less to women than to men across several domains.

14/n Everyone thought harm-based arguments were the most convincing, regardless of condition. But, in line with our predictions, the relative convincingness of harm (compared to fairness/purity) was increased when talking to the political outgroup. (figure is for Republican participants)

13/n ... the most convincing arguments for their position (pro or anti decriminalization of sex work). Importantly, we told them to either convince a group of fellow Republicans/Democrats, a group of the political outgroup, or a mixed group.

12/n So in the remaining studies, we examined whether people are more likely to use harm-based arguments when talking to a value-based outgroup member. We recruited Democrats who supported the decriminalization of sex work and Republicans that opposed it. We asked them to select...

11/n But why does harm make such a useful strategic tool? We argue that people know that it is the "common ground" they share with outgroups. E.g. someone opposing sex work bc of religious beliefs likely knows that arguments based on religion will not be convincing to non-religious people.

10/n ... I care more about other stuff anyway." So we gave opponents and supporters information either in line or contradicting their views. As expected, people claimed harm was a less important reason for their views when the information was in opposition to their pre-existing views:

9/n ... claims that the decriminalization of sex work increases or decreases harm shouldn't affect the stated importance of harm. But if people use harm strategically, then giving them information that contradicts their views may make them go "actually, harm is not that important to me. ...