Sally Xie

SFU social psych is hiring a tenure-track Asst Prof!! 🤩🎉 Our search prioritizes Black scholars. Come join a wonderful dept full of smart, kind people, and do psych research surrounded by mountains, ocean, a city, and natural beauty in BC. Please share widely & happy to answer qsts! flyn.im/dGFOwuT

Two married professors and their son are being held in ICE detention, despite being legal permanent residents and having no criminal records. All, apparently, because their mom/MIL was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before they were even born. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

🌊 👀 Can two simple patterns create something that really isn't there? This new paper introduces Dynamic Illusory Waves (DIWAs)—a striking illusion where relative motion gives rise to flowing, transparent phantom surfaces. Make your own: maltacogsci.org/diwa/ Full paper: doi.org/10.1177/2041...

Stoked to read this:

McGill social psych is now officially hiring at the assistant prof level, hooray Happy to chat with anyone about the position mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

For neuroscience PhDs with a strong interest in teaching and mentoring: MIT is hiring a scientific program manager to support activities around a new NIH neuroscience PhD training grant. Salary range $91k - $129k #NeuroJobs careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

We are hiring an assistant professor in Metascience! Join our lovely department of Human-Technology Interaction, with a very active Metascience group, at Eindhoven University of Technology. Apply here before August 14, or share the vacancy in your network! www.tue.nl/en/working-a...

"If scientists align with campaigns that pitch their opponents as anti-science, they should not be surprised if greater polarization is the result." I have some real strong thoughts on this piece. Let's talk about it... 1/? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

Glad to see this story and coverage of an important paper. www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n... 1/16

8 anti-ICE protesters received sentences from 30 to 100 years, with several receiving 50 years or more. The harsh sentencing is meant to be a warning that intimidates activists around the country. 🧵

TIL the Haribo Starmix gummy candies sold in Italy contain no artificial food coloring dyes like red 40, yellow 5 (nor any preservatives) because the EU regulated these additives after the 2007 Southampton study but neither US nor Canada regulated, so the ones manufactured here are still toxique

Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups Perspective by Paul A. M. Van Lange & Paul K. Bergmann bit.ly/4eFHMjK #psychscisky #socialpsych

Rather than submitting papers to (or reviewing for) Frontiers journals, consider these alternatives: -PLOS -Collabra -eLife -OpenMind

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

I'll be recruiting PhD students (2027 entry) and a postdoc to join the lab at Berkeley. Interests: • continuous person perception in interactive contexts • impression management and its biases • social perception in digital spaces Get in touch if there's overlap. Very excited for this next chapter!

I’d like to add something else to this convo: many of people who qualify for permanent residency in the United States would no longer qualify if they went home — because their existing visa is on the basis of refugee status (fear of home) or a job they’d lose. Like it’s absurd at every level.

Adding pointless administrative burdens to deter legal immigration

Politicians endlessly blame immigration for their own failures. So, when immigration is reduced, their ‘success’ isn’t recognised. No one’s life has particularly improved. Because no one’s life was ever going to improve by reducing immigration. Because our problems were never caused by immigration.

Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

My (very) short piece on how prenatal experience with the mother's voice may rapidly scaffold the development of face perception in newborn infants is now out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

Relationships as Microcultures is a new theoretical perspective on what it fundamentally means to be in a close relationship. It’s been a dream working on it with this amazing team of scholars, and I’m so excited that the preprint is ready to share. See Maya’s thread and link to it below!

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

Here's a Society Workshop report about using AI models to learn about a new area of knowledge (in this case the psych of inequality). My favorite part of this was when GEMINI referred to our research as "Kraussian" -- the first time it has been referred to in that way (except in my mind, perhaps).

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results. (One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

Like this. newrepublic.com/article/2068...

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...

“File drawer 2.0” “[Supplementary] files offer optimal settings for spinning research outcomes by sorting information between the main document and supplementary files to fit one’s narrative, making information technically available but effectively invisibilised.” By @paulbertin.bsky.social

Very proud of SoCoSci Labbies Cy Butler and Tom Vanderkam for delivering a great talk and poster presentation! This was Cy's first symposium presentation--and Tom's first poster award for his presentation at the Self & Identity preconference. YAY! 🎉👏 #spsp2026 @spspnews.bsky.social

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

My first grad student Cy will be giving their first talk at #SPSP2026!! #mentorfeels 🥳 come learn about new research on gender from four fantastic speakers

If you’ll be at @spspnews.bsky.social this week, consider joining the symposium my advisor Peter Mende-Siedlecki & I are co-chairing on Friday (3:30-4:40 pm; @Room E350), featuring talks from @ahbailey.bsky.social, @jowylie.bsky.social, Cy Butler, and me! #SPSP2026

It’s time yall! I’m excited to co-organize a symposium with @freemanjb.bsky.social at @spspnews.bsky.social this week!! Come by Friday morning (8am, room 450B) to see some amazing talks by phenomenal researchers! @xallysie.bsky.social @chujunlin.bsky.social @whatsinertia.bsky.social #SPSP2026

Collaborative groups often outperform single individuals in complex problem solving. A new paper examined how to create the right incentives to promote this kind of collective intelligence. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

fun paper with an important message about common method variance:

"Right-wing political orientation is positively associated with national identification even among individuals who are disadvantaged by the system." New work by Luca Caricati: doi.org/10.1002/casp...