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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt
@sampratt99.bsky.social
110 followers 340 following 220 posts
Psychology PhD student at UCLA 🐻 learning about morality, politics, and consciousness
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Mar 11
New paper in early publication at Annual Review of Psychology: @kurtjgray and I review how the mind makes sense of morality.

We argue that morality is fundamentally tied to perceptions of harm/victimhood/suffering and discuss how to understand and bridge moral/political divides
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 2d
Nobel prizes are out, did anyone else get honorable mention?
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 10d
spsp.org/news/character-and-context-blog/pratt-jones-bridgland-supportive-classroom-safe-space-messages-trigger-warnings
Want a More Supportive Classroom? Skip the Trigger Warning | SPSP
Safe space messages signal trust and openness, but trigger warnings don’t.
spsp.org
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 10d
New post about the signals that trigger warnings and safe spaces send to students in SPSP blog👇
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Try out the WCHS here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
Introducing the Words Can Harm Scale: a measure of the belief that words can cause psychological harm.

Preprint and online assessment in next tweet!
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
You can read the full preprint here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Thanks to co-authors Payton Jones, Ben Bellet, Rich McNally, and @kurtjgray.bsky.social
OSF
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doi.org
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
The belief that words can harm was consistently related to poorer psychological well-being, including:

-Anxiety
-Depression
-Difficulties in emotion regulation
-Anxiety sensitivity
-Lower resilience
-Belief that the self and others are vulnerable to trauma
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
The WCHS was correlated with:

-Intellectual humility
-Empathy
-Support for trigger warnings/safe spaces
-Concern for political correctness
-Tendency for interpersonal victimhood
-Moral grandstanding
-Left-wing authoritarianism
-Belief in the importance of silencing others
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
Who scores higher on the Words Can Harm Scale? In our sample (N = 956), the belief was more common among:

- Younger people
- Women
- Non-White participants
- Political liberals
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · 15d
✍️ New Preprint:

"Sticks and stones may break my bones..." but can words really harm?

We created the Words Can Harm Scale (WCHS) to measure the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological harm.

You can take the online assessment here: sampratt99.github.io/Words-Can-Ha...
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 28
Open access paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 28
People often rely on their own judgment over the "wisdom of the crowds" when making tough decisions (e.g., "which school should I attend?")

A new study found that across 12 countries, most participants went with their gut even when given the option to consult others.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 25
New study finds that as birth rates have declined, we've started spending more on pets.

And across several studies, dog lovers often prioritized dogs over people in moral dilemmas 🐶 > 🙍
helenldevine.bsky.social
Helen Devine @helenldevine.bsky.social · Aug 25
Study 1: National spending on pets is strongly negatively correlated with the birth rate (r = -.93; controlling for GDP). This replicated at the county level.

Less babies born = more 💸 spent on pets, which may suggest a caregiving trade-off.
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Open access paper here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Moral Perceptions in Politics: Ideological Asymmetries in Perceived Moral Obligations and Stereotypical Perceptions Across Leftists and Rightists
In two studies conducted in Spain, we identified asymmetries in moral judgements, showing that leftist political topics and individuals were perceived as more moral than their rightist counterparts. ....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Open access paper here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
I see this a lot in political psychology and wonder if there is a better way to conceptualize left-right differences. My first thought is a bottom-up approach where participants first tell us what they value. Curious to hear what approaches others are taking 👇
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Bottom line: We should be careful not to project our liberal biases onto participants. It’s not enough to pick 6 “right-wing” issues and cite Jost when participants don’t necessarily treat those issues as right-wing.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Put together: if the sample doesn’t really tap conservative attitudes and participants don’t agree on the left-right coding, we can’t conclude that “right-wingers feel more obligation toward leftist causes.”

To their credit, the authors dropped the two worst-performing topics.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Why I’m cautious #2: Biased sample.

Study 1 consisted mostly of university-level psychology students: 63% left-identifying and 68% women. This raises the important question of whether anyone in this study is actually "right-wing."
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
Why I’m cautious #1: Category slippage.

The “left” and “right” categories imposed by the researchers aligned with the perceptions of leftist participants, but not as much with rightists. For rightists, many of the left-coded issues seemed politically ambiguous.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
What they did: Participants rated their moral obligation to defend 12 issues derived from past research: 6 left-coded (e.g., gender equality) and 6 right-coded (e.g., capitalism).

Result: both leftists and rightists reported greater moral obligation toward left-coded topics.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 22
A new study seems to show that right-leaning participants care more about left-leaning causes than right-leaning ones 🤯

A surprising finding, but I think we should be cautious about this interpretation 🧵 1/8
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 19
Open-access paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Doubling-Back Aversion: A Reluctance to Make Progress by Undoing It - Kristine Y. Cho, Clayton R. Critcher, 2025
Four studies (N = 2,524 U.S.-based adults recruited from the University of California, Berkeley, or Amazon Mechanical Turk) provide support for doubling-back av...
journals.sagepub.com
sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 19
People are averse to "doubling back": in a virtual reality maze game, over half (56%) of participants chose a longer route over a more efficient route when the efficient option required them to "double back", effectively undoing their previous progress.
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sampratt99.bsky.social
Sam Pratt @sampratt99.bsky.social · Aug 18
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos:

"The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness"
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