Curtis Puryear
Assistant Professor at UNCW studying morality, politics, and intergroup conflict.
puryearc@uncw.edu
http://curtispuryear.com
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearDo ethnic minority interest parties grow through programs, or people? Schaaf, Otjes & Spierings show that DENK’s support in the Netherlands stems mainly from personal & religious networks, while online ties matter less. #ComparativePolitics Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearIntervening on a central node in a network likely does little given that its connected neighbors will "flip it back" immediately. Happy to see this position supported now. "Change is most likely [..] if it spreads first among relatively poorly connected nodes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearDepolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearI mean, we are living in two different realities now, and this really hasn't always been the case.
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearI’m very excited to share that my paper “Cleavage theory meets civil society: A framework and research agenda” with @eborbath.bsky.social & Swen Hutter has now been published online in @wepsocial.bsky.social (w/ open access funding thanks to @wzb.bsky.social!) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearNew preprint 🚨 Cognitive bottlenecks make LLMs more morally aligned with people 🧠🤖 We made AI “think” more like people by narrowing its focus to a few key moral cues. This AI better predicted people’s moral judgments & was more trusted. 🧵 ⬇️
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearEver stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearThe CHES EU team has published a new research note in @electoralstudies.bsky.social describing some trends across the 25 years now covered by our trend file and exploring two new items included in the 2024 wave of the survey: doi.org/10.1016/j.el... Here’s a summary thread: 1/
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearWe live in an era of democratic backsliding. But the terminology of "backsliding" isn't up to the task of making sense of the deep crisis of liberal democracy around the world. I've just finished a working paper that lays out what I think is going on. tl;dr it's about the state and society 🧵
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearWe know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearI have a new article out at @polstudies.bsky.social. In "Electoral Hope", I make the case that supposedly irrational "wishful thinking" is actually a crucial part of how voters make rational sense of their role in democracies. OA link: doi.org/10.1177/0032...
- Reposted by Curtis Puryear👅Can moral language boost pro-immigrant messages and be as effective as anti-immigrant messages? ➡️ @kristinabsimonsen.bsky.social shows that pro-immigrant actors are not always bound to lose against the anti-immigrant side www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView #OpenAccess
- Reposted by Curtis Puryear🚨 New paper in Science Advances @science.org Can changing how we argue about politics online improve the quality of replies we get? T HeideJorgensen, @gregoryeady.bsky.social & I use an LLM to manipulate counter-arguments to see how people respond to different approaches to arguments Thread 🧵1/n
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearI have a new paper on "The Psychology of Virality" with @steverathje.bsky.social We explain how similar psychological processes (eg preferential attention to negativity, social motives, etc.) drive the spread of information across online and offline contexts: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearReally enjoyed my conversation with @chrislhayes.bsky.social about how protests can shape public opinion. He also generously invited me to share a bit of my personal story which helps put the research in context. — Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w... — Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2Byd...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearEnglish language is filled with trait words like “caring” and “smart” These words are the currency of personality/social psych, yet key questions remain about their evolution, function, and structure We take on these questions in a preprint led by @yuanzeliu.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...
- New preprint! We developed new measurement tools to examine moralization in ~2B Twitter/X & Reddit posts and ~5M traditional media texts. Key finding: moralization increased markedly on social media from 2013-2021; more than traditional media; associated with multiple user dynamics 🧵👇
- Social media lets people share their perspectives globally and instantaneously for the first time in history. But it can also incentivize people to boil complex issues into simplistic, moralized narratives. This might create a moralizing shift in discourse, which we identify and explain here.
- Finding 1: Moralization increased significantly on social media. Rate of moral words increased on Twitter/X by 41% from 2013-2021 (1.28% of words in posts to 1.80%) and word embeddings showed topics shifted .296 SD toward morality. Moral words also increased on Reddit, to a lesser degree: by 6%
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View full threadHere is the link to the preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... Huge thanks to my collaborators: @williambrady.bsky.social @nourkteily.bsky.social , who helped shape this project from its inception. And to @joshcjackson.bsky.social and @ycleong.bsky.social , who helped expand the scope of this project.
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearThanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>
- Does anybody have a good visualization to explain how interactions can be confounded, and why interactions require interaction controls? @urisohn.bsky.social maybe? (Asking because I have an idea, but want to check out what exists already before investing the effort)
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearIs America an oligarchy? Bernie and AOC say yes, touring the country to “Fight Oligarchy.” Other Democratic leaders aren’t so sure. With the debate heating up, I wanted to share a few insights from our recent paper on who’s funding American politics. 🧵 cup.org/4cfm0Az
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearWere wealthy donors key to Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020? I'm thrilled to announce a new paper in which Sean Kates, Eric Manning, Tali Mendelberg and I analyzed data on 108 million (!) homeowner-voters. See “Plutopopulism: Wealth and Trump’s Financial Base.” Open access: cup.org/4cfm0Az 🧵 1/
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearNew study analyzed 145 years of U.S. congressional speeches and found a clear shift away from evidence-based language toward more intuition-based language—especially since the mid-1970s. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearNew paper by @kunstjonas.bsky.social & Mesoudi on acculturation. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.... A must read!
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearReally proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social. We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…
- Reposted by Curtis PuryearThe most successful person-to-person politically persuasive messages are those that bridge identity divides, use perspective taking, and incorporate personal narratives, finds @naunovmartin.bsky.social Ruedo-Cañòn @tjryan02.bsky.social in @thejop.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
- Reposted by Curtis Puryear[This post could not be retrieved]
- If you want to see more of our data on longitudinal trends in moralization, I'm giving a symposium talk tomorrow morning at 8:00AM in Four Seasons Ballroom 1 #SPSP2025
- @curtispuryear.bsky.social a study of a decade of twitter posts shows and new measure of moralization shows that moralization has substantially increased over time (d = .45!). Driven by both self selection and within-user increase over time! #comppsych #spsp2025 (also stay tuned for this paper😎)
