Calvin Lai

@calvinklai.bsky.social

Social psychologist & professor at Rutgers University.
Studying how to reduce prejudice and discrimination.
Opinions are my own. he/him
calvinklai.com

@mcopelov.bsky.social Oct 15, 2026, 10:18 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Today in “neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party”

@shannonmattern.bsky.social Oct 15, 2026, 2:41 AMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

"Men can generally be bad dept citizens as long as their research is valued, but women can’t." "Meritocracy is really just a way [to support] the status quo of a dominant white, male envrnmnt…I thought that if I worked hard enough, my work wld be recognized. But [that's] not how the system works."

@jayvanbavel.bsky.social Oct 14, 2026, 4:12 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Initial actions to promote diversity can be followed by decisions “blind” to candidates’ demographics

This intervention reduces concerns about a diversity–meritocracy trade-off in workplace hiring & grad admissions
psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

@brendannyhan.bsky.social Oct 14, 2026, 9:26 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

We're planning a public execution. We only admit white "refugees" from a former apartheid state. Our domestic security service uses white nationalist messaging. And the president routinely appears to encourage or endorse violence against his opponents & the media. Nothing subtle or complicated here.

@calvinklai.bsky.social Oct 13, 2026, 3:33 PM

💡I’m recruiting a Social Psychology PhD student at Rutgers for Fall 2027 to study how to reduce prejudice and discrimination. More info about my lab, the Diversity Science Lab, can be found at: www.calvinklai.com

Please share this post widely and with students who might be a great fit!

Hidden biases within the mind create a gap between what people value (e.g., racial equality) and what people do (e.g., racial discrimination). Our research seeks to close this gap by understanding how these biases work, figuring out how to reduce them, and developing interventions for addressing their consequences.

@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social Oct 12, 2026, 11:27 AMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

a simplified facelike stimulus consisting of three blobs for eyes and mouth on a head-shaped background, and its non-facelike control stimulus with the blobs inverted upside down.

@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 6:54 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

New working paper w/ @hannafolsz.bsky.social In 2025, Trump targeted US law firms for their political opposition Some firms resisted by suing Trump. Others folded by agreeing to support the administration w/ pro bono work Resisting firms took a short term financial hit but improved reputations

@catherinesjwall.com Oct 10, 2026, 5:06 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Well. This is a thing. A few weeks ago, I announced my new publication in American Psychologist on LinkedIn and didn't do it here. This was clearly a mistake, as some of Bluesky has decided to pile on some... Critique of a student article talking about my work in context. I have some things to say🧵

@polanalysis.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 5:29 AMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Letter: Do AI models read ideology from faces? Jeon, Lee, @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social & @calvinklai.bsky.social varied only the face in neutral campaign ads. All three models rated women more liberal than men, beyond survey gaps. Racial effects varied by model.
doi.org/10.1017/pan.2026.10038

Flowchart of the study design in four steps, left to right. 1: A Facebook-style campaign ad showing an AI-generated portrait of a smiling woman, with neutral text asking for an endorsement in exchange for a window sticker. 2: A prompt asking the model to write a caption for the candidate and pick a political view from very conservative to very liberal. 3: The model’s caption, a campaign message about a brighter future that says the candidate leans liberal. 4: A bar chart of ideology labels across five categories, from very conservative to very liberal, with an arrow pointing to the liberal bar.

@npr.org Oct 7, 2026, 10:18 AMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Researchers uncovered the graves of more than 1,000 children next to juvenile detention facilities in 29 states. At one Maryland gravesite, 230 Black boys are buried. n.pr/4zauALa

n.prOver 1,000 children are buried at juvenile detention centers nationwideResearchers uncovered the graves of more than 1,000 children next to juvenile detention facilities in 29 states. At one Maryland gravesite, 230 Black boys are buried.

@dangaristo.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 8:13 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

@davidlevari.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 6:57 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Screenshot of the article "Morewedge, C. K., Huh, Y. E., & Vosgerau, J. (2010). Thought for food: Imagined consumption reduces actual consumption. Science, 330(6010), 1530-1533."

@thomastalhelm.bsky.social Oct 5, 2026, 12:57 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Is America becoming less biased? New results from a presentation at #SESP offered some data. 🧵 First, when researchers just asked people explicitly about their attitudes, everything went down from 2007-2020--race, weight, disability...

@ahbailey.bsky.social Oct 4, 2026, 3:09 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

🗣️ New preprint! @jialin-lin-zhou.bsky.social

Western samples tend to think of a "person" as a man. How persistent is this?

Striking evidence from two novel groups begins to answer this question; see below for findings from the matrilineal Mosuo and from an age-diverse mainstream Chinese sample ⬇️

@benedek.bsky.social Sep 24, 2026, 1:49 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

📊 New resource: ISAAC, an open corpus for studying social group attitudes
💬 527M+ Reddit posts (2007–2023)
🧠 Covers race, sexuality, age, ability, and skin tone
🗺️ Validated against Gallup and Google Trends
🔍 No-code or Python/SQL: isaac.psychology.illinois.edu
📖 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.27059

We introduce the Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC), an open, modular, and accessible corpus of 527 million+ English-language Reddit posts selected for relevance to six key social group distinctions based on race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone, covering the 17-year period from 2007 to 2023. A multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline was used to keep irrelevant content in the curated dataset below 10%, both overall and for each social group distinction. Each post was then algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region, along with a suite of validated off-the-shelf and custom semantic labels including moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. We confirm the validity of the resulting corpus through convergent evidence linking ISAAC to macro-level societal trends, such as online search behavior, temporal spikes during major societal events (both nationally and regionally), and long-term shifts in public attitudes. By offering a unified, public infrastructure, ISAAC eliminates research fragmentation and enables seamless replication while supporting diverse empirical workflows at scale. Specifically, ISAAC allows investigators to perform cross-category comparisons, conduct high-precision tracking of long-term temporal shifts in social group discourse, and map spatial variation onto localized public opinion and policy outcomes. ISAAC's fully public, modular pipeline facilitates easy extension of the corpus to new platforms, languages, and social categories. To accommodate various research needs, ISAAC is accessible both without coding through a point-and-click website and labeler web-apps, and programmatically via an SQL playground, a Python package, and HuggingFace.

@wamsleylab.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 1:29 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

The fiscal year is over.

The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years.

Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

@letsgomathias.bsky.social Oct 2, 2026, 12:27 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

New: Chris Rufo & his co-host devoted a podcast to "The Indian Question," framing Desi people as a problem to be solved.

Their "solution?" Mass expulsion. For those allowed to remain: an “assimilation hazing process” w/ instances of “vulgar, defamatory racism" talkingpointsmemo.com/news/chris-r...

talkingpointsmemo.comChris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a ThingTo the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in...

@aedwardslevy.bsky.social Sep 30, 2026, 6:52 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear"

www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).

@thomastalhelm.bsky.social Sep 29, 2026, 1:43 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

I wrote a little blog post for Springer Nature about my research project that took 20 years!
communities.springernature.com/posts/how-a-...

@ajwright.bsky.social Sep 25, 2026, 7:29 PMReposted by @calvinklai.bsky.social

Since our paper on the Changing How I Live Life (CHILL) Study is now out in Psychological Science (doi.org/10.1177/0956...), here's a LONG overdue post on the intervention work we've been doing the past few years!

Have you ever wanted to change one of your personality traits?

Older posts