Mark Rubin

@markrubin.bsky.social

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🔹️metascience - philosophy of science - social psychology - higher education 🔹️Professor at Durham University, UK. He/him. 🔹️Website: https://sites.google.com/site/markrubinsocialpsychresearch/ 🔹️Substack: https://markrubin.substack.com/

ABSTRACT
System justification theory (SJT) explores the psychological and ideological motives of those supporting social and political structures of inequality. Given that SJT is generally explored through a framework that emphasises motivated social cognition, there is comparatively limited emphasis on the discursive and rhetorical dimension of system justification. We demonstrate how system justification is enacted in discourse by using a discursive-rhetorical psychological framework to analyse UK Parliamentary debates discussing ‘Brexit’—the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. The discursive-rhetorical psychological perspective locates system justification within argumentative settings in which politicians present themselves as democratic preservers of the status quo to defend or undermine contrasting Brexit positions. Speakers construct different versions of the status quo, indicating that the existing state of affairs is not an object with a predetermined definition. Our findings suggest that system justification in discourse should be explored in terms of how people actively defend or oppose systems themselves.

Abstract
Drawing on feminist metascience and Ridgeway’s “framed by gender” theory, I ask: How are men and women social scientists constructed in public media? I conduct a comparative analysis of media portrayals of eight public sociologists (four women–men pairs): Arlie Hochschild–Barry Glassner, Juliet Schor–Richard Florida, Angela Duckworth–Daniel Kahneman, and Michelle Alexander–William Julius Wilson. Findings reveal that women’s work is frequently de-legitimized by trivializing their contributions and emphasizing political biases, whereas men’s work is framed as empirical, rigorous, and legitimate, even when flawed. Women are often denied what I call “scientific deference” á la Goffman. These asymmetries underscore that scientific meritocracy and objectivity are not intrinsic properties of science but are instead culturally constructed ideals. By demonstrating how media narratives reflect and sustain gendered hierarchies of epistemic authority, this study extends feminist critiques of science beyond STEM and highlights the role of public discourse in shaping who counts as a legitimate

Abstract
Open science is an increasingly important movement in contemporary social science. Many funders have begun to mandate open practices, newer journals like Socius are open access, and preprint servers have increased readership for paywalled articles. Feminist scholars have written about the values and pitfalls of open research. In this paper, we put those ideas in conversation with each other and empirical data on open access publishing to develop a feminist framework for thinking about feminist knowledge, data, publishing, and audience. Using a survey of 19,462 social scientists, linked with their entire Web of Science publication history from 2000 to 2023 and all papers posted to SocArXiv, we replicate past work showing that articles by women are less likely to be some types of open access. We extend these findings to scholars of color and feminist scholarship, while also demonstrating a few surprising null results for all three groups.

Abstract
How does gender shape who can successfully claim authority in science, and how does this vary across disciplines? Drawing upon theories of doing gender and feminist epistemologies, I examine a key mechanism through which scientific authority is established: novelty claims, defined as rhetorical statements that frame research as novel, distinct from actual novelty. These claims operate as gendered professional practices linking gender to scientific impact. Through analysis of 106,125 papers from SciSciNet and Microsoft Academic Graph databases, I find that novelty claims mediate gender gaps in citations differently across disciplines. In STEM fields, women first and last authors make fewer novelty claims than men, and this is associated with fewer citations. In humanities and social sciences, novelty claims remain positively associated with citations, but there are no gender differences in their use or in citations. These patterns persist after controlling for women’s representation in each field, indicating that gender hierarchy gets reproduced through deeper epistemic power relations rather than demographic imbalance.

Abstract This introduction brings feminist scholarship into conversation with metascience and open science. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we argue scientific reform is not a neutral technical project. Rather, practices intended to improve rigor, transparency, and accessibility may also expose marginalized scholars and research participants to harm, reproduce inequality, and facilitate hostile scrutiny, particularly in the current political environment. These tensions point to the need for feminist metascience and feminist open science. We define feminist metascience as the study of how gender and intersecting relations of power shape the production, evaluation, circulation, and correction of scientific knowledge, and we define feminist open science as an approach to transparency that remains attentive to care, protection, and risk. We offer these definitions and the articles in this special issue as a starting point for larger conversations about how feminist scholarship might contribute to emerging debates over scientific reform.

Recognizing social identity complexity as one form of group complexity, we introduce two new kinds. Intergroup complexity encompasses perceived overlap between the ingroup and outgroup(s), whereas outgroup complexity entails overlap among outgroups (greater overlap yields simpler perceptions). Both apply to domains with at least one ingroup and two outgroups. Testing ideas from the social identity, gender, and sexuality relations literatures, we collected peoples’ perceptions of intergroup and outgroup complexity among gender and sexuality categories separately, using an online survey with a convenience sample of American adults (N = 287). Results revealed that people perceived greater intergroup than outgroup complexity, less sexual than gender complexity (especially so among sexual outgroups), and were more likely to report greater intergroup complexity as their ingroup’s status increased. Moreover, social dominance orientation moderated status effects. Implications focus on the applicability of these new forms of group complexity and their consequences.

Abstract
It is commonly argued that understanding (particularly regarded in terms of intelligible explanation) and prediction are distinct and possibly competing objectives in scientific theorizing and modeling. Here I leverage Wilkenfeld’s notion of “understanding as compression” along with the link between prediction and compression from algorithmic information theory to establish that prediction and understanding are instead intimately linked. I clarify the definition of understanding as compression to address unclear aspects of Wilkenfeld’s original definition, and I propose that the oft-discussed conflict may result in part from confusion between understanding proper and vehicles of understanding (such as statistical or computational models). I exemplify the unification of prediction and understanding through compression via a discussion of the role of large neural network models as tools for understanding brain function in neuroscience.

Terminology Table 1 summarizes the core terms used in the checklist. We define a theory as a set of interrelated propositions about (aspects of) the world that aim to explain and predict certain phenomena (Guest & Martin, 2021; Van Dongen et al., 2025). Theories typically do so by specifying mechanisms— accounts of how the entities, processes, and their organization described by the theory give rise to the relevant phenomena. We define phenomena as stable features of the world that may constitute the targets of theoretical explanation. In psychology, such features are often inferred from robust patterns of empirical observations, that is, observations that can be made repeatedly and by using different procedures (Bogen & Woodward, 1988). Notably, the assumption of the existence of the phenomenon may be false (e.g., due to errors in measurement). Theories typically consist of concepts (i.e., abstract ideas used to describe, differentiate, think about, or reason about certain aspects of the world), relations among these concepts, and further assumptions. Together, we call these the elements of a theory. Our terminology further adapts a semantic view of scientific theories. We assume that a theory is always expressed in some verbal form (i.e., in natural language) to communicate it to others, but it may also be expressed in, for example, a formal model. A formal model represents a specific version of (parts of) a theory expressed through formal means such as mathematical equations, algorithms, or logical propositions (Glöckner & Fiedler, 2025; Guest & Martin, 2021; Robinaugh et al., 2021; Smaldino, 2020; Van Rooij & Blokpoel, 2020). If a theory is expressed in a formal model, then, the elements of the theory are typically represented in the formal model by variables, parameters, constants, and the functions and operators that connect them. Together with any auxiliary assumptions added during formalization, these form the elements of a formal model. The same verbal theo…

"Do researchers claim their findings are applicable to the real world? An empirical study of social and personality psychology articles"

Abstract
Recent years have seen growing emphasis on “Open Science,” a movement to enhance research transparency, robustness, and accountability. Prompted by concerns over fraud, questionable research practices, and low reproducibility in psychological research that emerged in the 2010s, Open Science has been framed by some dominant advocates as a new approach to research in psychology and across the social sciences. However, women in social science have long practiced and promoted principles now hailed as innovative, although their contributions are often left out of mainstream narratives. This erasure is troubling, especially as feminist scholars have critiqued the increasingly exclusionary culture of mainstream science reform. This article traces the overlooked contributions of five pioneering women: Mary Whiton Calkins and her replication efforts in the 1890s; Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley, who advocated for analytical precision in the 1910s; Alice Bryan’s 1940s adversarial collaboration; Carolyn Wood Sherif’s metascientific work in the 1960s; and Leonore Tiefer’s promotion of conflict-of-interest declarations of sex research in the 2000s. I document how their contributions laid the intellectual foundations of what is now contemporary Open Science in the social sciences. In doing so, I celebrate a lineage of feminist scientific labor that has always emphasized openness, ethics, and equity.

A Book of Truths (BoT) perspective and a Book of Conversations (BoC; Davis- Stober et al. 2025). Those holding a BoT attitude see the primary purpose of the academic literature as creating a definitive, reliable repository of established knowledge, a canon that can be assessed and trusted at face value by expert and lay readers alike. By contrast, those adopting a BoC attitude view academic literature primarily as an ongoing exchange of ideas and communication among researchers, valuing provisional findings, preliminary data, and emergent questions as inherently worthwhile contributions to cumulative science, regardless of whether they achieve formal publication or definitive verification. These divergent attitudes imply fundamentally different thresholds for what counts as acceptable epistemic risk in data sharing. Where a BoC attitude treats intermediate, unvetted data as intrinsically valuable, a BoT attitude worries that sharing raw findings risks misleading the scientific community or distorting the epistemic record. What appears to one researcher as reckless exposure to another appears as essential democratisation. This attitudinal divide, we argue, underlies many tensions in contemporary OS practice. In this paper, we examine how OS initiatives are complicated not only by global asymmetries in resource and infrastructure, but also by these fundamental attitudes about what knowledge is for and how much risk is acceptable in service of scientific progress.

Part of the rationale for preregistering research hypotheses is the idea that it protects researchers against hindsight bias, a key process underlying HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known). With hindsight bias, researchers might retrospectively overestimate the foreseeability and plausibility of observed findings (and report hindsight theories around them that may not hold up in further research). Strangely, the idea that preregistration protects against this type of hindsight bias has never been tested empirically. Using the self-reported post hoc expectedness of research outcomes as a proxy for hindsight bias, we conducted a (preregistered) survey of posters (N = 351) at two scientific conferences. We asked poster presenters how much they thought their findings emerged as expected, and if they had preregistered their study. Unexpectedly, we found that preregistration was unrelated to expectedness (r = −.01). We discuss possible (hindsight) explanations of our null findings, including the idea that there may not be much research-related hindsight bias that researchers need to be protected from.

This editorial considers the current practice of assigning badges for articles in journals that adhere to the values of open science, irrespective of their methods or epistemological perspectives. Although many virtues of open science exist, I question practices of open science that may support some epistemological approaches to science while devaluing or compromising others. Specifically, I am concerned that unreflective practices marginalize the historical practices endemic to qualitative methods that already serve open science goals and strengthen methodological rigor. As well, I express concerns about prioritizing adherence to open science over a depth of engagement with research ethics. I indicate that how prioritization may disempower communities in the research process and may be especially dangerous for minoritized participants. In a friendly parody of the practice of assigning open science badges, I propose an alternate set of badges for ethical scientific practice to illustrate pathways that can emphasize epistemic pluralism and research ethics. Through this editorial, I point to unresolved problems in the field and encourage open science advocates to address methodological pluralism and its implications for research ethics, social justice practices, and scientific rigor in order to strengthen all of psychological science. The article calls for the acknowledgement of these issues and suggests routes to address them.

Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, in Paris at the Place du Carrousel.

Possible questions to be addressed in the special issue include, but are not limited to:

•To what extent are concepts like “evidence”, “theory” or others instantiated or used differently in different fields and what does this imply?

•How do attempts to achieve certain epistemic aims (for example predictions) differ across disciplines?

•What is the common core of narrative explanations across the sciences?

•What can we learn from comparing ontological commitments of different fields?

•In what ways can comparative philosophy of science contribute to a general theory of science?

•What are methodological challenges or pitfalls of a comparative approach to philosophy of science?

•How can comparative philosophy of science inform teaching?

Diversity ideologies prescribing how to manage intergroup relations are increasingly relevant in pluralistic societies. This project examined how intergroup contact and four diversity ideologies (colorblindness, multiculturalism, interculturalism, and polyculturalism) relate to intergroup attitudes in five countries: Turkey, Georgia, Switzerland, the US, and Belgium. Across eight studies (cross-sectional, longitudinal, meta-analytic) using majority and minority samples (total N = 3,578), we tested whether these ideologies statistically mediated the effects of positive and negative contact on affective, attitudinal, and behavioral intergroup outcomes. We hypothesized that interculturalism and polyculturalism would better explain contact effects than colorblindness and multiculturalism. Results supported our hypotheses: interculturalism and polyculturalism consistently emerged as significant indirect pathways in the link between positive contact and intergroup outcomes across contexts and group status, while colorblindness and multiculturalism did not. These findings suggest that contact fosters endorsement of newer ideologies promoting openness and identity flexibility, in line with deprovincialization processes in diverse societies.

We are looking for collaborators to join this large-scale PhD project examining the predictors of intergroup contact. The project investigates psychological and contextual drivers shaping whether ethnic majority and minority group members engage in - or avoid - contact across diverse sociopolitical settings. The study will employ a cross-sectional survey design and will be launched simultaneously in multiple countries (estimated data collection starting in 2027).
This 3.5-year PhD project is coordinated by Somidha Ray (PhD candidate) under the supervision of Dr. Anna Stefaniak and Dr. Nicole Tausch at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, and is developed in collaboration with an international research team that first came together at the EASP24 Small Group Meeting on Advances in Intergroup Contact Research in Hamburg, Germany.

The study provides a comprehensive test of the asymptotic model of intergroup contact, which posits that the relationship between cumulative intergroup interactions and prejudice in nonlinear—with bias reduction being most pronounced at early stages and diminishing as experience accumulates. Using 21-day diary data from Polish and Ukrainian residents of Warsaw, and Bayesian multilevel modelling, we estimated 56 models crossing seven types of intergroup experience (from mere exposure to meaningful interaction) with eight indicators of intergroup bias. Results offered partial support for the model: 22 of 56 models met all three evaluation criteria (I.e., superior predictive accuracy over the linear model, a credibly negative contact effect, and a theory-consistent curve shape). Support was strongest for more engaging forms of contact (e.g., pleasant, meaningful interactions) and weakest for outgroup-directed empathy and inclusion of other in the self as the DVs. Implications for intergroup contact theory, methodology, and intervention design are discussed.

While intergroup contact effects were long assumed to be robust, recent evidence using within-person analyses has often failed to corroborate these findings at the situational level. This study investigates this discrepancy in Poland, a country that transitioned from a predominantly homogeneous society to the world's leading refugee-hosting nation following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Through a four-wave longitudinal panel design (NT1= 1,354; NT4 = 894) , we compare Polish participants’ affective (e.g., warmth, friendliness), cognitive (e.g., competence, dehumanization), and behavioral (e.g., helping, policy support) outcomes toward two outgroups: a culturally similar group (Ukrainians) and a symbolically threatening group (Middle Easterners). We test this across different ways people have contact, including positive and negative direct contact, friendship, extended contact, and mass-mediated pathways. Using Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (RI-CLPM) to isolate situational fluctuations from stable individual differences, we aim to replicate previous findings in a different context and extend the current evidence by testing various pro-outgroup outcomes. We hypothesize that because Polish people view Ukrainians as more similar and Middle Easterners as a cultural threat, the context will facilitate significant within-person contact effects for the Ukrainian group, whereas such effects may remain non-significant for the Middle Eastern group. All hypotheses and analytical strategies have been formally pre-registered, with data analysis currently pending.

Much of what we know about the drivers of intergroup contact engagement is based on stable individual differences (e.g., personality) and broad contextual factors (e.g., neighbourhood ethnic diversity). While informative, this largely static approach overlooks the dynamic, micro-level psychological and situational factors that shape intergroup contact as it happens. In this talk, we present findings from a large intensive longitudinal study of interethnic contact of 669 White British adults (M age = 50) across 14-days in the UK. Results show that daily intergroup contact was predominantly shaped by situational opportunities and momentary psychological states (incl. self-efficacy, social norms, and attitudes). By integrating individual dispositions, structural opportunities, and day to day variation in motivational and situational factors, we develop a dynamic account of intergroup contact that moves beyond static, trait-based explanations and captures how contact engagement unfolds in everyday contexts.

Prejudice against people in disadvantaged socioeconomic positions is among the most socially accepted biases, yet intergroup contact research has largely overlooked it. Initial evidence suggests contact reduces such prejudice, but stable individual differences rather than genuine attitude change, may explain these associations, a pattern already documented for cultural groups. Prejudice against socioeconomic groups further involves stronger legitimization through inequality beliefs and weaker social identity dynamics, which may additionally constrain contact effects. Using three waves of the German Social Cohesion Panel (N > 5,000) and Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models, we compare contact effects for socioeconomic (low-income, low-education) and cultural (Muslim, migrant) groups. We expect between-person associations but little within-person change across groups, with associations for socioeconomic groups being smaller and partly explained by individual differences in inequality beliefs. Preliminary results will be presented that help understand contact effects across group types that differ in how their disadvantage is socially justified.

The contact hypothesis posits that intergroup contact reduces prejudice, yet recent longitudinal studies have failed to detect its expected within-person effects. We argue that this may reflect temporal misspecification: prior research used time scales too sparse to capture short-term dynamics. Across two intensive longitudinal studies (N = 5,072; 170,348 experience-sampling reports), we examined whether intergroup contact predicts momentary attitude change and whether such effects accumulate over time. Using Dynamic Structural Equation Models, Study 1 (4-week global ESM) showed that contact predicted more positive attitudes and lower perceived threat within individuals, while attitudes also predicted subsequent contact, indicating a feedback loop. Study 2 (14-day diary with follow-up) replicated these effects and showed that individuals with stronger within-person contact effects exhibited greater long-term reductions in prejudice. Crucially, change was driven not by contact frequency, but by its momentary impact. These findings reconceptualise contact as a dynamic, person-specific process unfolding at short time scales.

Recent advancements in contact theory emphasize the relevance of "contact ruptures", i.e., shocks of habitual behaviour leading to meaningful and substantial changes in intergroup contact patterns, for the detection of naturalistic longitudinal intergroup contact effects on outgroup attitudes. We test this assumption by investigating the opening of a large permanent refugee accommodation as a contextual shock to everyday-life contact experiences in the direct neighbourhood. Conducting an intensive 9-wave longitudinal survey in a small town in rural South-Western Germany (N T1 = 147) , we assessed the neighbourhoods’ levels of positive and negative contact experiences and outgroup attitudes before and after the initial moving-in of diverse refugee groups in a mixed residential and commercial area.

Issues of group-based bias, privilege, conflict, and discrimination are at the forefront of global consciousness. A critical concern, therefore, is how to reduce biases and promote more positive relations between diverse groups. Decades of social psychological research provides a potential answer: intergroup contact, i.e., contact between people belonging to different groups. In general, I will discuss limitations as well as the promise of intergroup contact as a comprehensive strategy for overcoming the challenges associated with diversity. I will also offer an intergroup contact perspective on understanding and overcoming challenges in one specific group domain that is a new direction for me: the domain of patient-oriented health research. Patient-oriented research is that which involves patients, caregivers, and families as partners in the research process. It is a core component of inclusive health research. Contact that occurs between patients and researchers/ clinicians represents intergroup contact. The science of intergroup contact can offer insights into how to optimize this specific form of intergroup contact, patient-oriented research, and health research overall

Contact with outgroup members can serve as a powerful demonstration of the quality of intergroup norms to other ingroup members. This extended contact of fellow ingroup members with outgroup members is known to positively affect intergroup attitudes. Research has demonstrated a positive relationship between positive extended contact and positive intergroup attitudes—even for those most prone to prejudice, such as those high in authoritarianism. However, little is known about the relationship between negative extended contact and intergroup attitudes, or about its interaction with authoritarianism. With correlational data from seven samples (totaling 2,760 respondents across four countries), we ran an internal meta-analysis examining the relationships of positive and negative extended contact with attitudes towards immigrants for group members of advantaged ethnic-cultural groups. The analysis controlled for direct contact and relevant demographic variables to ensure robustness. We considered right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and its subdimensions as a moderator of these relationships. As expected, positive extended contact showed a stronger relationship with attitudes towards immigrants for high authoritarians. Unexpectedly, negative extended contact showed no interaction with authoritarianism. Put differently, negative extended contact showed a similarly large relationship with intergroup attitudes among high and low authoritarians. These results reveal an extended contact asymmetry: positive intergroup norms created by positive extended contact promote tolerance among authoritarians, whereas negative extended contact does not particularly harm those individuals more. Contrary to our expectations, the analysis of RWA’s subdimensions did not reveal further insights. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the current debates on norm-setting and intergroup tensions.

How do people form cross-race relationships in everyday life, and do people vary from each other in this process? Answering these questions can yield useful insights for scholars interested in encouraging cross-race contact. We investigated how people (N=1,156 Bay Area adults) met their different-race (versus same-race) contacts, the roles that different-race contacts occupied in their personal networks, and the content and quality of their relationships with their different-race contacts. We found that different-race contacts were, on average, “around but not close”. They were met in less intimate settings; they occupied less intimate roles; and they were felt less close to. Importantly, processes varied across people. People who formed cross-race kin relationships were the most likely to have stable cross-race contact, and people who engaged in “high effort” activities with their different-race contacts (e.g., confiding in) had closer relationships with them. We highlight insights of these results for encouraging cross-race contact.

Economic inequality shapes how people perceive minority groups and erodes social trust more broadly, yet evidence connecting inequality to intergroup contact remains limited. We present a virtual reality replication of the Bimboola paradigm to examine whether immersion in an economically unequal society, together with experimentally manipulated socioeconomic status, influences attitudes toward minorities and willingness to seek intergroup contact. Participants are assigned to positions within a stratified virtual society and navigate everyday environments that render inequality salient through differences in resources and social status. We will report results from two studies conducted in Italy and Australia.

Intergroup friendships are a powerful means of reducing prejudice and fostering social cohesion, yet little is known about what facilitates their formation among youth, a period when friendships become increasingly important. Drawing on parental socialisation research, we propose that parental modelling—specifically interethnic friendships—predicts young people’s interethnic friendships. Using a large longitudinal sample of 8,567 youth (including 747 minority members) across three years in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, we tested this proposition. Latent growth curve analyses indicated that interethnic friendships increased over time. Youth with more parental intergroup friendships at baseline, as well as minority youth, reported more interethnic friendships initially and showed greater increases over time. However, the positive association between parental friendships and initial friendship levels was weaker for minority than majority youth. These findings highlight the importance of parental influence in shaping youth intergroup contact and contribute to understanding key predictors of intergroup friendship development.

Personal control is seen as universally beneficial, yet it may exacerbate nationalism’s pernicious role in intergroup divides. We analysed cross-sectional multilevel data from the World Values Survey (N = 160,000 participants; 79 countries). Findings revealed a 4-way interaction involving national pride, personal control, outgroup type and ingroup social status. For members of the host country, personal control exacerbated the pernicious effects of national pride on contact willingness toward ethnolinguistic outgroups (e.g., immigrants) and purity-related outgroups (e.g., homosexuals), whereas it muted the pernicious effects for indulgence-related outgroups (e.g., heavy drinkers). For immigrants, the pattern depended on whether they were naturalised or not: While there was no interactive pattern for naturalised immigrants, for recent immigrants again personal control exacerbated the pernicious effects toward ethnolinguistic outgroups but muted the pernicious effect toward both purity-related and indulgence-related outgroups. The findings highlight how individual and group-based factors jointly influence openness to diversity and social cohesion.

Welcome to the third ICRN Summit!
What began as a small gathering of intergroup contact researchers has grown into a vibrant international community united by a shared interest in understanding and improving relations between groups.
As researchers of intergroup contact, we study how meaningful interactions can reduce barriers, foster understanding, and build connections. This summit is built on the same principle.
Over two days, we invite you to share your research, engage in discussions, meet new colleagues, and explore new collaborations. Whether you are attending your first ICRN event or have been part of the network from the beginning, whether you are student or professor, we hope you will find opportunities to learn, contribute, and connect.

ABSTRACT
The social turn in epistemology was driven, in important part, by the recognition that we are dependent on testimony for much of our knowledge. But this dependence renders us vulnerable if we are unable to distinguish reliable testimony from unreliable. With the debate over echo chambers as a case study, I argue that social epistemology remains deeply individualist: it is driven by the search for individualistic foundations by reference to which we can assess testimony for and by ourselves. I argue that this search for individualistic foundations is a fantasy: our capacity to assess the reliability of evidence and informants is constituted by the dispositions that are constitutive of our echo chambers. Social epistemology must finally be truly social, and live with the vulnerability that comes from epistemic dependence.

The stereotype inoculation model (SIM) posits that exposure to ingroup role models can buffer students from stereotyped groups (e.g., women) against stereotype threat by enhancing their confidence and belonging. Yet little is known about how to foster confidence in classrooms led by outgroup (male) instructors. Extending SIM, we propose that relatable intermediate figures, such as teaching assistants (TAs), can provide similar inoculative benefits in classrooms led by outgroup professors, but only when they display cues of competence. Across three field experiments in Malaysia and the Netherlands, involving Asian (Studies 1-2, N = 138 & N = 163 respectively) and female (Study 3, N = 113) students, we measured TA vocal confidence (vocal intensity, i.e., decibels) and students’ own vocal confidence, having immersed them in classroom either led by ingroup or outgroup professor. Students showed high vocal confidence when taught by ingroup professors regardless of TA vocal cues, whereas in outgroup professor-led classrooms, students’ confidence increased only when TAs displayed strong vocal confidence. These findings highlight the critical role of proximal, intermediate-status ingroup figures in mitigating stereotype threat in outgroup professor-led classrooms and demonstrate how subtle acoustic cues can serve as scalable tools for enhancing resilience and inclusion in diverse STEM learning environments.

Antecedents of intergroup contact in segregated urban settings remain understudied. This qualitative study focuses on Shenzhen, a Chinese megacity (18M), where institutional and socioeconomic segregation places migrant villages adjacent to locals’ high-end estates. Applying the COM-B model (Capability–Opportunity–Motivation–Behaviour) to 18 semi-structured interviews (n=8 rural-to-urban migrants; n=10 locals), we explore whether physical proximity counteracts urban segregation, and what structural and psychological factors shape both groups’ contact motivation. Preliminary findings from thematic analysis reveal that intergroup contact is limited and asymmetrical: minority–majority inequalities in capabilities to opt in/out of contact (C), power over spatial access (O), and motivations (M). Locals control interaction intimacy and timing, whereas migrants meta-perceive distance and report a lack of autonomy. Regarding opportunity, migrants report structural factors, like gated access and price barriers, limiting mobility; whilst locals retain choice by high SES members deliberately avoiding neighbourhoods and low SES locals functionally utilising migrants’ spaces. Regarding motivation, locals’ stated contact willingness mismatches their near-zero engagement, explained by safety/boundary concerns; migrants report complex motivations, including an aspirational approach alongside avoidance driven by anger and inferiority. Thus, unpacking a stark divide beneath surface proximity.

We are hardly the first to express concern over the use of p-values to justify scientific claims, or to point out that multiple comparisons invalidate p-values. Our contribution is simply to note that because the justification for p-values lies in what would have happened across multiple data sets, it is relevant to consider whether any choices in analysis and interpretation are data dependent and would have been different given other possible data. If so, even in settings where a single analysis has been carried out on the given data, the issue of multiple comparisons emerges because different choices about combining variables, inclusion and exclusion of cases, transformations of variables, tests for interactions in the absence of main effects, and many other steps in the analysis could well have occurred with different data. It’s also possible that different interpretations regarding confirmation of theories would have been invoked to explain different observed patterns of results.

I started to notice how research that seemed ill-conceived to me–based on vague theories or using questionable experiment designs– could be called out as exemplary simply by touting the right set of open science practices, a.k.a., “rigor-signaling”.