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Abby Cassario

@abbycassario.bsky.social

1.6K followers 800 following 230 posts

Social/personality psych PhD student at MSU interested in attitudes and belief systems. NC native with an affinity for dogs, Carolina Hurricanes hockey, craft beer, coffee, and swimming. https://abigailcassario.github.io

abigailcassario.github.io

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · May 20

🚨🚨 NEW PRE-PRINT 🚨🚨

Prominent theories in political psychology argue that threat causes increases in conservatism. Early experimental work supported this idea, but many of these studies were (severely) underpowered, and examined only a few threats and ideological DVs. 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 2d

This is SO helpful. Thank you so much!

Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 2d

Has anyone ever written an LOR for a medical school app and know what committees tend to look for? I’m writing one for an absolute rockstar of an RA and want to make sure I’m highlighting the right things!

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Reposted by Abby Cassario

Abdo Elnakouri @abdoe.bsky.social · 2d

Hi all! Having recently moved to @uh.edu, I’ll be reviewing graduate applications to join the newly minted Worldviews in Motion lab for Fall 2026! Please share with anyone who might be interested 😊

For lab info, check out our (though it’s mostly me atm) website: www.abdoelnakouri.com

WIM Lab

www.abdoelnakouri.com

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Moral Minds Lab @moralmindslab.bsky.social · 5d

Did you hear the news? New interview dropped!

Meet @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social in her interview with @msupsychology.bsky.social!

Learn about her research interests, how to get involved, and the @psychresearchlist.bsky.social website.

psychology.msu.edu/news-events/...

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Reposted by Abby Cassario

Marcel Roman @mfroman.bsky.social · 7d

Natalism for me but not for thee. Read my new working paper w/ @tylerreny.bsky.social and Ben Newman: we show some conservative white people support legalizing abortion and contraception access in an effort to minimize the growth of the non-white population.

Tyler T Reny @tylerreny.bsky.social · 7d

📢 New paper w @mfroman.bsky.social and Ben Newman: Why do some conservative White Americans support abortion? It's not gender or religion. They want to slow the growth of disliked out-groups. bit.ly/4mFYYXd

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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 9d

Increasing the minimum wage decreases poverty and food insufficiency.

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 12d

Does anyone know of any *panel* data that has a question asking people to compare their *subjective* SES to that of their parents? I’m using some WVS/EVS data with an item like this right now but the repeated cross sectional design is… less than ideal for my specific question

Reposted by Abby Cassario

turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 14d

I believe that the experimental paradigm in "polarization research" should receive strong criticism for its thin conception of political culture. I make this argument in a new blog post.

Experiments Can’t Reduce Partisan Animosity
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/experiments

The Question of Manipulability

I believe that this is a long-overdue correction for a reason. Much of the literature on polarization has operated under a tacit assumption: that political attitudes are malleable.

If you frame an issue one way, you can shift people’s support for particular candidates. If you “humanize” out-partisans, animosity declines. If you push people into a room and make them discuss a question for 15 minutes, you see that ideology is more moderate than it would be1. The implicit theory of political culture operating here is that people’s ideologies are weak, malleable, and ready to be channeled into something “good” if only we have the “right” intervention.

1 That is, they are more likely to be 2, 3, or 4 in a Likert scale than being 1 or 5 on a 5-point scale.

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Meltem Yucel @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social · 13d

Come join the Moral Minds Lab as a grad student at MSU! Brand-new lab equipped for child & adult testing, with motivated undergrads in a happy department. 🤩

Learn more: www.moralmindslab.com/join-our-tea...

(P.S. @tedmond.bsky.social is also taking a student!) @msupsychology.bsky.social

Family friendly waiting room for participants

Family friendly waiting room, picture shows children's play area

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 13d

Younger people are more pessimistic about the economy and about open and fair elections. This is bad. www.pbump.net/o/the-doomer...

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 13d

what can I say, I'm living the dream 🤷‍♀️😂

Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 13d

It's ~so~ much fun when your "small" "side" project ends up having 60 models per study across 4 studies with some machine learning thrown in for fun. 🤷‍♀️

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turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 14d

people's opinions are formed through a combination of long-lasting exposures and political socialization, and we should not expect one-shot experimental settings to *scale* in the first place.

this is such a needed correction to the "polarization" literature:

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 15d

Depolarization 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/...

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 20d

I’ve been in Michigan for three years now and I still can’t tell whether that many Michiganders are awful drivers or if there are cases where it’s legal to take a left on red here

Reposted by Abby Cassario

Silviya Nitsova @snitsova.bsky.social · 21d

This is a fantastic and much needed contribution. Highly recommend to anyone interested in building strong designs for rigorous empirical work with networks.

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · Dec 12

Designing Empirical Social Networks Research by Jennifer M. Larson

An introduction to the study of social networks, with a focus on theory-building to guide empirical research design.

New in the Methods for Social Inquiry series #ResearchMethods

📚 cup.org/3VDut9L

Designing Empirical Social Networks Research

Cambridge Core - Research Methods In Politics - Designing Empirical Social Networks Research

cup.org

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mark brandt @mjbsp.bsky.social · 21d

A new preprint, lead by lab undergrad Aymin Triki, with machine learning support from @abbycassario.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 24d

An academic job app wants my employment history going back three employers, which for me means a place I worked in college called "Wicked Weed." They also want my manager's name. My friends, does this sound like the kind of establishment where I'd know my manager's last name? 😅

Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 27d

nice to know osf is a mountain goats fan

Reposted by Abby Cassario

Society for Personality and Social Psychology @spspnews.bsky.social · 29d

Recent research in #PSPR highlights why people's perceptions of inequality matter more than official statistics for predicting political behavior. The study outlines five key psychological processes that shape how we see inequality around us.

Learn more: ow.ly/C7Y550WTS5p

Aerial view showing dense urban buildings adjacent to a forested area under sunlight.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · Sep 8

This is the same court that just said you can't use race at all in college admissions. It was always about white supremacy.

Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · Sep 8

BREAKING: The Supreme Court — over the objection of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — allows the Trump administration’s racial profiling of people working certain types of jobs in its immigration raids during litigation.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
-
No. 25A169
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KRISTI NOEM, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, ET AL. U. PEDRO
VASQUEZ PERDOMO, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY
[September 8, 2025]
The application for stay presented to JUSTICE KAGAN and by her referred to the Court is granted. The July 11, 2025 order entered by the United States District Court for the Central District of California, case No. 2:25-cv-5605, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and
JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
In early June, the Government launched immigration enforcement raids across Los Angeles and its surrounding counties. During the raids, teams of armed and masked agents pulled up to car washes, tow yards, farms, and parks and began seizing individuals on sight, often before asking a single question.
A Federal District Court found that these raids were part of a pattern of conduct by the Government that likely violated the Fourth Amendment. Based on the evidence before it, the court held that the Government was stopping individuals based solely on four factors: (1) their apparent race or ethnicity; (2) whether they spoke Spanish or English with an accent; (3) the type of location at which they were found (such as a car wash or bus stop); and (4) the type of job they appeared to work. Concluding that stops based on these four factors alone, even when taken together, could not satisfy the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonable suspicion, the District Court temporarily enjoined the Government from continuing its pattern of unlawful mass arrests while it considered whether longer-term relief was appropriate.

Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of
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NOEM v. VASQUEZ PERDOMO
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court's order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.

*
*
The Fourth Amendment protects every individual's constitutional right to be "free from arbitrary interference by law officers." Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S., at 878. After to-day, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation's constitutional guarantees, I dissent.

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Colin Case @colinrcase.bsky.social · Sep 5

Excited to announce my paper, Measuring Strategic Positioning in Congressional Elections, is officially accepted and online @thejop.bsky.social here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Quick thread on the paper below:

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Ted Schwaba @tedmond.bsky.social · Sep 2

I'm looking for a PhD student to do some trailblazing at the frontier of personality genomics and lifespan gene-environment transactions (start Fall 2026)! If you want to work with me: psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud...
(PS @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social is taking a student too, in moral psych/dev!)

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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · Sep 2

Turgut, you're always up to something cool! Excited to give this a full read. :)

Reposted by Abby Cassario

turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · Sep 1

a new working paper: osf.io/vsr5b

I propose a three-stage model of cohortization where dynamics of cohort learning and political sorting serve as complementary engines of aggregate political change.

I apply this to the case of the killing of George Floyd & the BLM.

it's also my job market paper!

Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts

Turgut Keskintürk
August, 2025

How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article advances a three-stage model of cohortization, in which salient events produce age differential changes in attitudes, elite cues drive identity-congruent political sorting, and life-course timing regulates whether these attitude changes remain persistent over time. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using five surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2024. The findings consistently show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement—much more so among younger than older individuals. Moreover, the changes persisted for younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, offering a model for understanding how salient events can realign generational divides.

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Drew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · Aug 28

New article thinking about the interplay between identity and solidarity among people of color. How stable is each orientation in a national sample? How much does each feed into each other over time, if at all? Do things look similar or different across PoC?
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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