Worryingly, there is clear evidence that social psychology has become more political and more activist in its leaning. And if we don’t correct course, we only need to look at anthropology and increasingly sociology as examples of disciplines that have lost their way and have lost the public’s (and perhaps even undergraduate students’) trust. As the public funds the research we conduct, I would rather avoid that fate and stay relevant.

After publishing that essay—which was reprinted by the Chronicle of Higher Education—Ben Lovett reached out to me. Ben is is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches assessment, ethics, and the history of psychology. His expertise in history and ethics matters because apparently the tension I was writing about is not new. Ben has spent years tracing the collision between two movements that have remade our field: open science, which all my readers know about, and socially responsive science, which wants activism closer to the center of science itself. His essay on the subject deserves a far wider readership than it has found, so I asked him to lay out its argument here, in his own words.

Enjoy!

In October 2024, the New York Times ran a remarkable story. A researcher was delaying publication of results from a study of the effects of gender-affirming care on the mental health of trans youth, because the findings failed to show benefits. She pointed out that the results would likely be used by opponents of gender-affirming care. Her concerns seemed well-founded, particularly after Donald Trump was re-elected just a couple weeks later. But her decision was nonetheless troubling, and it seemed to highlight the tension between two recent trends in psychology. First, the standards for research have risen. The open science movement has promoted pre-registered studies, larger sample sizes, transparency in the reporting of results, and more. Second, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have proliferated, promoting psychologists’ greater involvement in activism, both within the profession and in the wider world, with a goal of a truly socially responsive science.

Tension between science and social advocacy has been around for a long time in psychology. As a professor, I teach about that tension in my history of psychology course. In addition, most of my other courses are about psychological assessment—an applied topic that has been associated with many social and political controversies over the years. Like me, my students are generally in psychology to try to help people, and often, doing and using the highest-quality science is the best way to do that. But there are other times when scientific goals seem to conflict with activist intentions, and in the past decade, those conflicts have become harder to ignore.

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Viewing the open science and DEI movements in psychology as a cultural anthropologist might, some similarities are striking. Both movements proposed new norms for scholars—norms that were promoted by charismatic figures on social media. Credit systems were created to award researchers with “badges” for open science practices and to rate journals with a score on a “diversity accountability index.” Major professional associations got behind both movements, with leaders issuing statements apologizing for their predecessors’ behavior and pledging to do better. Guides to very specific approved language were issued. And many prominent scholars took pains to show their support for both movements publicly.

Not only was the form of the two movements similar; there was also some conceptual overlap. Both movements accused the field of psychology of harboring biases (either confirmation biases, or prejudice against marginalized groups) that were doing considerable harm to people and that were also making psychological research less accurate. In essence, both groups of reformers were aiming to make psychology better. And as both movements proceeded, proponents claimed that practices which helped one movement would help the other as well. At the same time, areas of conflict have been minimized or ignored entirely.

One tension is that high-quality research can inadvertently hurt efforts toward social change. After the replication crisis, some of the work that came under the greatest scrutiny was research being leveraged to call for social policy changes. As research on topics such as stereotype threat and implicit bias were found to have problems, the scholars who had been citing that work in support of policy changes didn’t change their policy views, but simply kept citing the old, now-discredited findings, or else just made the empirical claims without any citations. In 2021, APA passed a resolution on ways that psychology could combat racism, and called for implicit bias training, despite having just recently published a meta-analysis finding such training to be useless at changing real-world behavior. Meanwhile, journal editors warned authors against submitting studies that might be construed as conveying harmful messages about marginalized groups; it was as if researchers were being told to find the right results or else stuff the data in their file drawers.

A second area of tension stems from the fact that open science’s reforms raise methodological standards for all researchers. Socially responsive science advocates have argued cogently that these reforms can have a disparate impact on the work of scholars from marginalized groups, or on work that is designed to foment social change. Some of these advocates also worry about enhanced “interrogations” about the objectivity of their work, which is often qualitative and small-sample by design. Rather than promoting universal reforms, socially responsive science advocates tend to propose interventions that compensate for existing biases in a particular direction. This might lead to policies where all special issues of a journal must address social justice, or where journals create positions just for scholars from marginalized groups. But the justifications for these reforms—that is, the existing biases being corrected for—are often simply assumed, and empirical work failing to find such biases is unwelcome.

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A final area of tension between the two movements has to do with the place of researchers’ personal, lived experiences. Open science draws from positivist traditions that view scientific data as being observable to any trained scientist. Claims are subject to public scrutiny and to the “organized skepticism” that sociologist Robert Merton viewed as a hallmark of science. In contrast, many advocates of socially responsive science view positivism as a limiting framework, and emphasize the value of the personal backgrounds and intuitions of scientists. Standing traditional ideas of objectivity on their head, these advocates argue that it is essential to consider the personal standpoint that a particular scientist approaches their work from. Claims derived from that standpoint are thought to deserve respect and attention, and it is rude to contradict someone’s lived experience.

In a recent essay, I explored these tensions in much greater detail, and provided some thoughts on ways forward, but any way forward needs to start by acknowledging the tensions. Unfortunately, the popularity of both movements makes that difficult. Psychologists are loathe to speak against either open science or DEI, and reasonably so. Who would be against transparency in research? Similarly, who would be against inclusiveness in their profession?

Interestingly, things were not so different over 80 years ago, when the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) surveyed its members about whether the organization should offer opinions on “controversial social issues.” Generally, the same members were in favor of both high-quality objective science and progressive political advocacy. The SPSSI chairman, James J. Gibson, observed that:

The most general feeling was that a paradox is involved in the opposition of objectivity to progressive partisanship which needs to be resolved. Upholders of scientific detachment do not like to be classed as conservatives and equally the progressives do not like to be classed as lacking in objectivity.

If the reluctance to acknowledge tensions can be overcome, trade-offs can be laid out more clearly. This has already happened with some open science reforms. Once the epistemic costs of some socially responsive measures can be similarly discussed, psychologists can decide if those costs are justified. For instance, if there are some scientific questions where we are not open to hearing certain answers, any research inquiries will be hopelessly compromised, and our time is best spent elsewhere. Perhaps those questions should be explicitly designated as being off-limits, like certain experiments in virology or nuclear physics, and psychologists should not claim to be basing their opinions regarding these topics on scientific inquiry. Similarly, if a researcher’s positionality is truly relevant to judging the researcher’s work, the key elements of positionality should be identified, with clear empirical justification, and those elements should be reported in a standardized fashion when a manuscript is submitted, with journals providing an explicit notice of how the positionality information will be used during the review process. At the very least, proposals that include these details can prompt a productive conversation about when, if ever, it is desirable to block the way of scientific inquiry and dissemination. At a moment of declining public trust and significant political threat to our work, such a conversation has perhaps never been more necessary.

Ben Lovett is Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches classes in psychological assessment, law and ethics for school psychologists, and the history of psychology. Last year, his essay Open Science and Socially Responsive Science: Conflicting Movements in Psychology was published by Springer.

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First, Tyler Austin Harper wrote the cover story for the Atlantic about his experience as a Black professor at a small liberal arts college in Maine. As he tells it, he was hired less because he was an expert in his topic area and a great teacher and mentor, and more because he was Black. Harper was more or less ok with being the beneficiary of affirmative action until he realized that his hiring also meant that he needed to go along with certain views and politics too. The price for entry into the elite was adherence to a specific brand of progressive politics. And when he refused to do that, he was no longer viewed as the right kind of Black. Harper eventually quit his plum appointment because he could not be his full self, he could no longer breathe.

Second, and more tragic, is the story of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who was hired to great fanfare as the youngest ever Black professor in Cambridge’s illustrious history. Much has been said about his story, so here is the short version. Arday was also a diversity hire, but unlike Harper, he was a fraud. It turned out he was not only a plagiarist, he also lied about nearly every part of his backstory. How could Cambridge have let this happen? One simple answer is that the administrators at Cambridge were too worried about how they would appear asking hard questions of a celebrated Black hire, they were anxious about what it would look like to “punch down”. It was only when Arday’s obvious fabrications were too hard to ignore, that Cambridge stopped shielding him and stopped treating the reporters who asked questions as the problem. Arday resigned in disgrace and was found dead nine days later.

Like I said, this was a tragic story. Last year I published a paid post with my own take on how our society has decided to treat race. I thought we made grave mistakes, and I wish the last few weeks had proven me wrong. I’ve decided to republish the essay here, now with the paywall removed. Please tell me what you think.

What if trying to fight racism made it worse?

I know how that sounds. But hear me out. Hate crimes in the U.S. have surged over the past 15 years, targeting Black people, Jews, LGBTQ folks, Arabs, Latinos, pretty much every protected group you can name. The same pattern shows up in Canada, despite our reputation for being nice…and boring. There are obviously multiple causes, but I can't shake the feeling that our shift toward aggressive anti-racism messaging might be one of them.

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And this isn’t just me being anti-woke. I got into social psychology specifically to reduce prejudice, and my dissertation was about the educational experiences of marginalized groups. So I care about diversity, but research I conducted over a decade ago suggests that coercive approaches to fighting bias can backfire.

Traditional approaches to fighting racism focusing on non-discrimination and colorblind ideals gave way to something more vocal and aggressive. The new anti-racism framework demanded active participation. It wasn't enough to avoid being prejudiced; you had to actively dismantle bias to create more equitable outcomes. Fair enough: systemic racism is real and persistent.

But then something changed. I found myself increasingly at odds with the modern anti-racism movement. The tenor of the movement became more aggressive, less tolerant. Some of the methods used to reduce prejudice relied heavily on public accountability and social pressure, creating approaches that felt coercive while leaving little room for grace.

That's when the movement lost me. And if it can lose someone who spent 15 years teaching about prejudice, imagine how normies would react.

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How could they lose me? Research I conducted over a decade ago, with my former students Lisa Legault and Jennifer Gutsell, now both tenured professors, offers clues. Back in 2011, we published a paper on prejudice reduction. Our goal was to see if we could reduce bias by working with people's intrinsic motivations rather than against them.

We created two different pamphlets framed as part of a new campus initiative. The intrinsic motivation pamphlet encouraged participants to see the personal value of diversity, emphasizing choice and explaining why prejudice reduction was important and worthwhile for them personally. The extrinsic motivation pamphlet used the language of prejudice-reduction that was common on campus in the late 2000s. It urged participants to “combat prejudice” and comply with social requirements to control stereotypical impulses, using terms like “erase racism” and “stop prejudice.” We also had a third group that received no pamphlet at all, our control group. We measured participants' anti-Black attitudes, which captured subtle modern prejudices like believing anti-Black prejudice is over-exaggerated or that Black people are demanding too much.

We predicted that the intrinsic messages would work better than the controlling approach, which we expected would still reduce prejudice more than doing nothing. What we found surprised us.

Yes, the intrinsic messages reduced prejudice compared to the control group. But what really stood out was that the pamphlet with the then-current anti-prejudice messages—the more coercive approach—actually increased prejudice compared to doing nothing at all.

We didn't believe the results at first, so we ran a second study and replicated the same pattern: positive effects for the intrinsic approach, but a clear backfiring effect for what we might now recognize (by today’s standards) as mild anti-racism messaging. As far as I know no one has replicated this work, and samples are small as was the custom in pre-replication crisis social psychology; so treat these results as provisional. Nonetheless, when looking back now, I think we accidentally discovered something interesting, man.

Fast forward to 2020, when anti-racism became a dominant framework for addressing racial inequality. At its core, anti-racism makes arguments rooted in the work of scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. As Kendi argues, “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.” In this view, passive non-discrimination isn't enough. The framework requires a commitment to actively fighting racism; if someone chooses the path of non-prejudice or non-racism, they are unwittingly supporting passive racism.

The core insights behind anti-racism have some merit. I’m convinced that forms of racism are embedded in some institutions and policies. I’m even more convinced that ostensibly neutral practices can maintain inequalities, even if inadverdent. These are important observations.

But…

For reasons unknown to me, practitioners of anti-racism adopted a coercive, heavy-handed approach. The message became clear: If you're not actively fighting racism, you are racist and any hesitation to embrace the framework makes you part of the problem. This approach manifested in mandatory corporate diversity training and diversity statements, public shaming for even simple mistakes or misunderstandings, and attempts to get people fired or not hired for opinions that went counter to the anti-racist approach.

This is exactly the kind of controlling, coercive messaging that our research showed can backfire. And more applied research confirms our surprising findings. Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev discuss how people often respond to mandatory diversity programs with anger and resistance, with many participants reporting more racist attitudes, not less. Diversity training is especially ineffective when it requires mandatory participation. This makes sense: when you tell people they have no choice but to think a certain way, people push back.

Want to see this dynamic in action? Let me tell you what happened to a colleague of mine when she gave a talk at a major psychology conference. This incident perfectly captures how anti-racist vigilance can spiral into something destructive and perhaps even undermine support for prejudice reduction more broadly.

What happened to her is both infuriating and instructive. It involves Bernie Sanders, Kanye West, a single complaint, and administrators who chose public shaming over private resolution. It's the kind of insider academic drama that illustrates what’s wrong with how we're approaching prejudice reduction today.

The colleague is my friend Jessica Tracy, a social-personality psychologist at UBC, when she won the Career Trajectory Award at the 2021 meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in Santa Barbara, California. The award is perhaps our field’s top honour for early-to-mid career researchers. (Full disclosure: when I was younger, I dreamed of winning this award, even imagining my acceptance speech where I’d break down in tears thanking my mom. I never won and never gave that speech.) The award is a big deal, so is that speech, and so is Tracy.

In her acceptance speech, Tracy talked about her research on pride and presented photos of Bernie Sanders and Kanye West. She used Sanders' photo to illustrate the nonverbal expression of pride in general. Nothing controversial so far. She then transitioned to discuss her research on the two different types of pride, using West as an example of what she calls hubristic pride, a grandiose form of pride associated with self-aggrandizement.

Do any of you see Tracy’s sin?

How dare Tracy use a Black man as an example of hubristic pride! Apparently one person complained about Tracy's choice of image—boy, would I love to know who this is—and the executive committee of the society sent a statement to all members more-or-less calling her presentation racist.

I’ve since learned that Tracy and the complainant had already resolved the issue directly, with the complainant accepting her personal apology and saying nothing more needed to happen. But the executive committee insisted on making a public statement anyway. I have no idea why they could not recognize this as a minor issue resolved between two professionals, but I suspect that they were too scared of appearing insufficiently anti-racist. Her life was in their hands, and they chose to sully her reputation over what was, at worst, an unfortunate choice of examples. Strike that. It takes a complete lack of grace to construe what Tracy did as wrong, and the executive committee should have known that. If you ask me, they owe her a public apology.

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This is the worst of anti-racism in action: hypervigilant, active, and punitive. Tracy wasn't promoting racial stereotypes; she was making a scientific point. But in the new anti-racist framework, there was no grace, no charity, no benefit of the doubt.

When people see colleagues publicly shamed for innocent mistakes or reasonable academic examples, it doesn't inspire them to embrace anti-racism. Instead, it makes them want to distance themselves from it entirely, to reject it. It might even push them to do the exact opposite of what those on the right side of history think is best.

Back in 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm described psychological reactance to explain a puzzle that every parent knows: why do children sometimes do the exact opposite of what they're told? Brehm discovered that when people feel their freedom is being threatened, whether by parental commands, government edict, or social pressure, they resist. More than that, they actively rebel, often moving in the direction they're being told not to go.

Reactance is a predictable response to feeling controlled. So predictable, in fact, that the patricians of our society should have known there would be a backlash to anti-racism.

There's a different way forward, and it was articulated beautifully in an interview last year with Sarah McBride, who is the first openly transgender Congresswoman in the US. Speaking with Ezra Klein, McBride argued for a politics of grace, which focuses on meeting people where they are rather than demanding ideological purity. She suggested that we should be forgiving of each other’s missteps and be more, not less, sensitive to intent.

This reveals a major flaw in the anti-racist approach: intent has been thrown out the window, and only outcomes matter. If someone feels hurt, the motives become irrelevant. When Tracy used Kanye West as an example of hubristic pride, the fact that someone took offense was enough to condemn her, regardless of her clear scientific intent. Her critics lacked grace.

Grace means giving people the benefit of the doubt when their actions could be interpreted multiple ways. The anti-racism approach does the opposite: failing to assume good faith or recognize that people are fallible. It also fails to distinguish between malicious behaviour and honest mistakes.

I wish we could have extended more grace to Tracy and others. So yes, I think we made a terrible mistake. In our urgency to address injustice, we embraced an approach that worked against human psychology. I’m not saying anti-racism messaging led to rising hate crimes, but the experimental evidence suggests these approaches can backfire.

But it's not too late to correct course. We can still pursue the important goal of reducing prejudice and creating a more equitable world.

We just need will and determination, and grace, too.

In this new piece Victória gets at something deeper, the permissibility of moralization itself. She interrogates the assertion that the deontological moralization of artificial intelligence is a perfectly reasonable position. She agrees it could be reasonable, but then asks whether it actually is, given what we know about AI and about how moralization works. You’ll also see that she doesn’t spare me in her analysis. Ouch!

I think the essay is brilliant, but I think that about nearly everything Victória does. I’m grateful she decided to let me reprint her essay here for your enjoyment.

In my last post on Speak Now Regret Later, I summarized our recent research on the moralization of artificial intelligence. A quick recap: we found that for some people who oppose AI, opposition isn’t really a risk-benefit calculation, but a moral commitment—closer to how most people feel about theft or cruelty than to how they feel about, say, tax policy.

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This distinction matters. Moralized attitudes have a specific and well-documented profile. People hold them as non-negotiable rather than as positions to be weighted. They don’t change in response to new evidence. And they correlate with a cluster of other things: intolerance of people on the other side, willingness to endorse violence in service of the cause, and a preference for keeping people with different attitudes at a distance. Whatever you think about AI, that particular bundle of attitudes does not sound like great news for a democratic society.

Several readers—in the comments, and a few more in my DMs—raised a reasonable objection. It went roughly: cool findings, but is the implication here that moralizers should swallow their pride and treat AI as a neutral policy question? And isn’t that a normative claim that your research is smuggling in? It’s a fair question, and I don’t think the answer is obvious. So I spent a while discussing and reading and thinking about it. Here’s where I ended up.

When is AI moralization the right response, and when is it a mistake?

One common answer to that question is based on a consequentialist logic. I call it the lazy answer–and yes, I’m talking to you, Mickey. The lazy answer posits that moralization is simply an error: if good AI policy requires weighting costs and benefits, then refusing to weigh them undermines that process. Under this view, moralizers should really just stop the drama and do better. But that response overlooks how humans actually make moral judgments on a bunch of other domains. Deontological ethics (which arguably describes how humans make moral decisions better than consequentialism) posits an alternative: some things can be wrong not because of the effects they bring about, but because they are wrong in themselves. Think about genocide, slavery, or fascism. They are appropriately held as wrong and non-negotiable, and we typically don’t accept people who treat them as open questions pending better data. This points to a distinction (originally made by Kant) between price and dignity: some things can be traded off against others, but some cannot, and treating the second kind as tradeable is itself a moral error.

The question, then, becomes whether moralized, non-negotiable AI opposition is ever based on some legitimate untradeable principle. So I propose two criteria for judging legitimate untradeable principles: whether the AI objection is based on some non-contingent principle (criterion 1) and whether AI threatens the deliberative process (criterion 2).

Criterion 1: The harm is non-contingent (deontology)

Moral philosophy distinguishes acts that are wrong in themselves from acts that are wrong only because of their consequences. A simple test separates them: if the harms were solved, would the objection go away? Genocide fails this test, as the wrong is the denial of people’s standing as persons, and no fix removes it. So does slavery. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are different: despite being morally opposed by some, objections are almost entirely about consequences; the food is unsafe to eat, transgenes will escape into wild populations, seed patents will eliminate small farmers, etc. If the food turned out to be safe, genes stayed put, and farmers remained competitive, would the objection remain? (Ideally) no. That is what it looks like to oppose an act for its consequences rather than in itself.

In our own studies, we asked participants to justify the reasons for their objections to several AI applications. A striking majority mentioned issues such as biased decisions, labor displacement, environmental costs, and misinformation. These are all worth serious consideration, but they’re also contingent: in principle they can be reduced or solved.

A few justifications, however, were non-contingent. Some participants said AI degrades human relationships, or the dignity of human life itself. For these objectors, technical fixes miss the point: we could make AI the best conversation partner imaginable, imbue it with all the right moral values, put every safety guardrail in place, and they would still think there is something wrong with people forming relationships with a machine, and something diminished about a life lived alongside one.

I have to admit, I struggle to grasp this intuition. I do worry that AI companions may be harmful for some people, but I don’t see anything that couldn’t in principle be fixed. For me, AI degrades human relationships no more than dating apps, and yet I don’t see people despising dating apps the way they do AI. I suspect there might be something else behind this justification, but whatever it is, the objection has the structure I’ve been describing—no fix dissolves it. So I’ll take it as non-contingent.

One might conclude, then, that moral opposition is warranted for some AI applications but not others—that objecting to AI companions on grounds of degraded human relationships is a categorically different move from objecting to chatbots on grounds of misinformation risk, since only the former rests on non-contingent reasons. In theory, that distinction should show up in how people actually judge these systems.

In practice, we found almost no evidence of such differentiation: moralization of one AI application strongly predicted moralization of others. Moral attitudes appear to spread across the entire “AI” category. But “AI” names systems that differ radically in purpose, architecture, and origin: a recommendation algorithm and a companion chatbot share little beyond the label. So a person whose objection to one generalizes to all risks extending it beyond the cases that have the feature that made the original objection non-contingent in the first place.

Criterion 2: The threat is to the deliberative process itself (proceduralism)

There is a difference between an outcome one judges wrong through a fair process and a threat to the fair process itself. For instance, opposing fascism is not rejecting one policy among many; it is defending the conditions under which policies can be debated at all. It is possible that some opponents perceive AI as threatening the process of collective deliberation—through concentration of power in the hands of a few powerful actors, the threat of large-scale manipulation, or the degradation of shared information. Another similar form of opposition could be based on a perceived threat of AI technocracy—a political system where decisions are delegated to the technical expertise of AI rather than to elected politicians.

Those are worth serious consideration given current asymmetries in the system: AI development and deployment are concentrated among a small number of firms and individuals who, with substantial resources and little external oversight, hold disproportionate power to determine how AI shapes society. In the United States, this dynamic is evident: industry actors have organized a Super PAC led by some of the wealthiest AI investors with the explicit goal of rolling back AI regulation. At the same time, the federal government has created policies that enforce the removal of all district-level regulations on AI, framing U.S. dominance in AI as a national policy priority and directing the administration to eliminate barriers to that end.

One could argue, however, that some concentration of power does not straightforwardly remove questions from contestation. AI companies can still be subject to litigation, investigative journalism, regulatory complaints, public pressure, employee dissent, and competing products. The question, then, is whether these facts about the current AI system genuinely threaten the process of collective deliberation—and if so, how severely. The degree matters: a distortion of deliberative conditions calls for correction, while their destruction would warrant something closer to outright moral opposition.

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Unwarranted but beneficial? The instrumental case for moralization.

The preceding two criteria concern whether AI moralization is warranted—whether it tracks something that genuinely merits non-negotiable opposition. A separate question is whether moralization is socially beneficial, and the two can come apart. A moral stance can be poorly calibrated to the underlying facts and still produce good outcomes through its effects on behavior, since moralization is so useful at mobilizing people. Take food taboos, for instance: they often rest on false beliefs—spiritual pollution, folk theories of the body—yet frequently track real hazards like toxic foods. So here I try to answer: can AI moral opposition, even if unwarranted, be justified instrumentally?

We described earlier two asymmetries in the current AI political landscape: concentrated power and the absence of regulation. Under conditions like these, constraint is unlikely to emerge from calm cost-benefit deliberation, since the better-resourced party is generally positioned to win: it can fund the studies, frame the tradeoffs, and lobby. Checks and balances, in this case, are more likely to come from countervailing power: organized opposition that does not negotiate on the terms the powerful party prefers.

Here, the very feature that makes moralization epistemically unwarranted can become strategic: because moral values resists being traded off, a moralized opposition cannot be bought off, out-argued on cost-benefit grounds, or incrementally accommodated in the way a calculated position can. In other words, moralization may mobilize people in the direction that is most needed when the appropriate checks are not in place, even when the reasons for doing so are unwarranted.

If this is right, moralization can serve as a corrective to a power asymmetry even when it misidentifies the underlying wrong.

The potential consequences of such strategy for AI could be several: it can make developers more cautious by raising the reputational cost of careless deployment; make policymakers warier of industry claims; and it can slow the pace of adoption, buying time for institutions and norms to adapt to changes that might otherwise outrun them. But this could also yield detrimental effects: the same mechanism that checks reckless deployment can also block the development of beneficial AI applications and slow scientific progress, for instance. Each of those assumptions is an empirical claim, and the instrumental defense stands or falls on whether those claims hold.

Two clarifications keep this argument from claiming too much. First, the claim proposed here is the weaker one: that moralization can be a second-best corrective under non-ideal conditions, not that it is good in itself or that a well-functioning deliberative system should prefer it to calibrated judgment. Second, the instrumental motive—collective mobilization checking disproportionally powerful actors—is not necessarily benign; movements that mobilize against powerful institutions can sometimes be detrimental (i.e., organized opposition to vaccination).

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In sum

I’ve said a lot, and my verdict is in: “is AI moralization warranted?” admits no single answer. On the two criteria I examined—inherent harm and threats to the deliberative process—most of the AI opposition we observed doesn’t clear the bar. The harms people invoke to justify their opposition are largely contingent and fixable, and the proceduralist case rests on an empirical forecast about how much AI actually impedes deliberation—a forecast that has yet to be established.

But warrant and value can come apart. Under conditions of concentrated power and weak institutional checks, even miscalibrated moralization might do useful work as a countervailing force. Whether it actually does, though, depends on where these attitudes lead, and that’s where things get uncertain.

Now, I want you to picture two futures. In one, today’s moral backlash is what slowed the reckless deployments, forced the audits, and bought regulators enough time to learn—and the outrage, in hindsight, looks like foresight. In the other, that same backlash is what stalled the model that would have flagged the tumor earlier, designed medications faster, or cracked open the next scientific revolution—and the caution, in hindsight, looks like cost. We will only ever live in one of these futures, and we’ll never get to check our version against the other. The upshot isn’t that AI moralization is right or wrong, it’s that its verdict rests on evidence no one will ever hold. And that should make everyone, moralizers and supporters alike, a little more humble.

After taking Introduction to Social Psychology with the legendary McGill professor Donald Taylor, I knew I had found my calling. Taylor—who sadly passed away during the pandemic—was a natural performer and storyteller who inspired countless young Canadian undergraduates to pursue careers in social psychology. For me, Taylor’s material came most alive when he talked about the psychology of prejudice.

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Before Taylor’s class, I had not realized there was a big part of an entire discipline devoted to studying discrimination in the hopes of not just understanding it but remedying it. As a Jewish kid, with Holocaust survivors on one side of my family and Yemeni refugees on the other, I had a keen eye for injustice. My family had been on the wrong side of hate more than once, including, I later learned, at the hands of pale-skinned Ashkenazi Jews. My formal education in Jewish history taught me that judging people by their identity rather than the content of their character was a sin, a moral stain. When I learned there was an entire discipline focused on this, I knew I had found my intellectual home.

I dove in headfirst. At Brown and NYU, where I did my PhD and postdoc, I conducted research on stereotype threat. At the University of Toronto, I created the university’s first course on the psychology of prejudice and taught it for nearly fifteen years. It felt like I was changing the world, one small step at a time. I could not have been prouder.

Then the replication crisis happened. I came to realize that much of my past work was the product of questionable research practices, and I no longer trusted it. I’ve recounted this story many times. But what I haven’t told you is the part I only see now, in hindsight. At the time, none of it felt like cheating. And I can’t help but wonder if it felt fine because the cause was good.

My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all.

However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I was. My question stopped being “What is true here?” and slid toward “How do I show that what I believe is true?” This is why I have come to believe that science and activism cannot mix. It is a plain conflict of interest.

I was never an activist, but I knew which answer I was hoping for in my research. That is all it takes. What I did quietly, some in psychology now argue the whole field should do on purpose: make scholarship serve the cause of justice. To see where that leads, let’s look at a discipline that has already done this. Consider anthropology, which once aspired to science.

Last month a group of scholars convened by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis reviewed several fields and found scholarly standards giving way to political ones, activism crowding out inquiry. They named anthropology the worst case, a discipline that had traded the search for truth for the advancement of a cause. Now one can argue about the report’s methods and conclusions, but a recent defense of anthropology by the president of the American Anthropological Association only confirms the report’s conclusions—and the public’s worst fears.

Carolyn Rouse, who once delivered a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” sat for an interview to defend her field. Shown a 2022 survey in which anthropologists split almost evenly on whether biological sex is binary, she waved it off: “I don’t believe in opinion research.” Say what!? A survey of practitioners in her own discipline turns worthless the moment it returns an inconvenient number. She compares teaching that sex is binary to turning an astronomy department into astrology.

Set aside whether Rouse is right. Pay attention to what she is doing: Evidence that agrees with her is fact; evidence that disagrees with her is contested. Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one who gives a shit about the rules?

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This is what I mean when I say science and activism should not mix. It is not that activists are dishonest or that justice does not matter. It is that science can only be loyal to one thing: the truth. When truth comes first, a survey that cuts against you is data you must accommodate. When justice comes first, that survey is noise to explain away, and the field slowly loses touch with reality. Rouse has a cause, and the cause now decides what counts as evidence.

Anthropology shows an entire discipline sorting evidence by conclusion. The next case is smaller, a single episode, but it happened in philosophy, a field I love and which is supposed to be best at following an argument wherever it goes.

In 2017, Rebecca Tuvel, then an untenured professor at Rhodes College, published “In Defense of Transracialism” in the feminist journal Hypatia, arguing that, if we accept the reasoning that supports transgender identities, and she does, that same reasoning seems to support transracial identities too. It didn’t matter that her argument was logically sound: more than 800 academics signed an open letter demanding retraction and a majority of Hypatia‘s associate editors apologized for publishing it. The stated objections were about vocabulary, citations, and the author’s identity. But everyone understood the real offense was the conclusion: if we accept Caitlyn Jenner, the same logic should extend to Rachel Dolezal.

Ten years later, in a recent interview, Tuvel reflected on what she learned from this incident. She still cares about justice, she says. What changed is the order. “I think philosophy serves justice best by pursuing the truth about justice. And the pursuit of truth about justice requires exposure to a wide range of views on contested moral and political topics.” Get to the truth first and let justice follow. She describes the world she had been working in as an echo chamber, a place where dissenting views rarely reached her and certain conclusions were treated as settled.

This is what worries me about where social psychology is heading. What captured Tuvel’s corner of philosophy is creeping into my field: scholars who know the acceptable conclusion before the evidence is in. I felt the pull myself. Now I see more of it, as more academics refer to themselves as scholar-activists.

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Don’t believe me? About five years ago, justice and truth were placed in direct conflict in my own corner of academia, and guess what happened?

In 2020, Bedoor AlShebli, Kinga Makovi, and Talal Rahwan published a large bibliometric study in Nature Communications finding that junior researchers mentored by women went on to be less successful in their careers. Twitter erupted. Within two days an open letter was circulating, hundreds of academics were calling the paper harmful to women in STEM, and the journal slapped a warning note on it. The stated objections were methodological: citations are a poor proxy for success, co-authorship a garbage proxy for mentorship. Fair enough. Except that two years earlier, some of the same authors had used the same bibliometric machinery, the same citation proxy, in the same journal, to show that ethnically diverse teams produce more impactful science. Nobody batted an eye at the method then. The method was fine when it flattered the cause and fatally flawed when it didn’t. Within weeks the authors retracted the female mentorship paper.

Now imagine a world where that paper stands and we ask why the citation gap exists. Is it discrimination with reviewers and citers undervaluing work written by women? Are women given or perhaps take on greater service loads that starve their trainees of needed attention? Do women have smaller collaborative networks, so their labs produce less? Do women, on average, gravitate toward safer, more incremental questions, while men chase the riskier and more citable bets? Each answer implies a different remedy, and several of these would help the students of female mentors. That world is better for the very people the retraction claimed to protect. But, no: we chose the world where nobody gets to know.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing for value-free science. Values can and do shape what we study. This is impossible to avoid. However, values should not determine what you find. Let injustice draw your attention to a question, but then let the evidence answer, even when the answer is inconvenient, embarrassing, or useless to your side. Publish those findings that even hurt your side because if you really care about your side, you should value truth first. I know how hard that is. The replication crisis forced me to give up findings I loved, findings that flattered things I believed. Giving them up and admitting my errors was the most useful thing I have done as a scientist.

I still want to make the world a better place. I just no longer believe a scientist does it by deciding first what the world should look like. Science demands humility. The job is to find out what is true, follow it wherever it goes, and only then decide what to do about it. Fight for whatever cause you want once the finding is in. But if justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed.

It happened on social media, naturally. Someone commented on one of my essays and, in my reading, ascribed bad intent to what I wrote. Uncharitable interpretations are the internet’s native tongue, so I almost scrolled past. Then I saw who wrote it. The commenter was an infamous psychologist who has been singing the same sad song for over a decade. Suddenly it was 2016 again. I could almost smell the sock puppets.

For those who weren’t there, the mid 2010s were when psychology went to war with itself over replication and reform. The battles played out daily on Twitter and Facebook, and for one regrettable year, I volunteered as referee. I moderated a Facebook group meant to keep the fights civil. Oh what a fool I was!

I wrote about that time as a paid post over a year ago, but think it deserves a second life in light of last month’s exchange. Below is a lightly edited version, now free for everyone. The wars are mostly over, but some combatants haven’t been told the bums lost. The bums always lose.

I had a front row seat to the replication wars in social psychology. Not just as an active participant who evolved from true believer to full-on skeptic, but as a moderator for a year of a Facebook group where many of the fiercest battles unfolded.

It was, without question, the worst year of my academic life.

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The year was 2016. Psychology was at war with itself. Social psychology had split into factions: younger scholars championing reform on one side, established figures defending traditional methods on the other—though you could certainly find older and younger scholars in both camps. My own position was evolving rapidly, but I remained caught between worlds in multiple ways: no longer young, but I didn’t feel established either. I remember my amusement when people online referred to me as a “senior and respected scholar.” They were talking about me?

The battlefield of this civil war was primarily social media. At that time, psychology Twitter and Facebook were must-see TV. I'd check them before class, after lecturing, and again at home. You wouldn't want to miss a minute because there was so much drama, practically every single day.

On Monday a paper would drop failing to replicate some sacred finding: “Huh, it turns out that the clothes you wear does not impact cognitive control; who knew?” On Tuesday the critics would gloat, “You see how shitty your so-called science is?” On Wednesday, the establishment would question the replicators’ abilities and motives: “Those second-stringers are trying to get famous by tearing down actual scientists.” On Thursday, some of the critics would escalate to personal attacks: “Yes, Professor X is famous, but he got famous by scientific doping!” On Friday, someone would break down in tears, crying “Shameless little bullies!” Rinse and repeat, with clockwork regularity.

This happened week in and week out for what seemed like an eternity. The replication crisis had been brewing since around 2011, with tensions escalating each year. By 2016, the field had already been through several years of increasingly hostile exchanges. The intensity of these battles made what was objectively a few years feel like decades. As much as I found this entertaining, in a horrifying sort of way, I also felt there could be a better way. Surely, someone could be the adult in the room and help us talk through our issues without so much acrimony.

Into this chaos stepped University of California Davis professor Alison Ledgerwood, who had the noble but naïve idea to create a moderated Facebook group called “PsychMAP” (Psychological Methods and Practices)[1]. The concept was simple: a space where psychologists could discuss replications, methodological reforms, and critique papers—but do it civilly, without the name-calling that had become standard everywhere else. The key to this group was that it would be actively moderated.

Unmoderated forums had devolved into hostile places where aggressive voices dominated, creating a climate of fear. Even tenured scholars hesitated to engage, worried they'd be branded ignoramuses for expressing uncertainty. And without their participation, how could the field truly take stock of itself?

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When Alison invited me to moderate alongside her, I jumped at the chance. My temperament leans authoritarian, so being a tone cop came naturally. We established ground rules: criticize ideas, not people. No ascribing malicious intent. No bullying.

A field won't take stock and actually change if there's no communication across divides. People needed space to work through these difficult realizations without being attacked, even if their initial reactions were defensive or misguided. And the only way we could have real conversation across “party lines” would be to turn down the heat. So, we tried something different, limiting certain forms of expression in service of deeper dialogue.

Some scholars understandably bristled at the idea of not being able to fully express themselves. Critics accused us of censorship. Nevertheless, I truly believed we could have searching conversations about our collective troubles, free of rancour.

Man, was I wrong.

Moderating the group quickly became a full-time job. We were monitoring discussions day and night until we eventually realized we needed to close the group in the evenings and on Sundays just to maintain our sanity. At one point, we even added a third moderator—God bless you, John Sakaluk—to handle the volume. We'd routinely have to pull people aside to reprimand them, or step in when conversations started heating up. We had to do this so often that we developed a script. We would flag the offending post with an image of a cup of coffee—think of it as a timeout with caffeine—and then privately DM the offender explaining what the issue was.

The day-to-day chaos was exhausting. One minute I'd be mediating a heated exchange between a senior researcher and their critic, the next I'd be fielding complaints about someone's tone. But nothing prepared me for the carnival of sock puppets that emerged—fake identities created by tenured professors (all dudes) to hide behind. At one point, we had at least three of these puppets running amok.

There was the notorious provocateur posing as “Jasmine Bond,” a supposedly demure Singaporean graduate student. We found him out when he accidentally posted under his real, not sock puppet account.

Then there was the very famous scholar who couldn't handle his very famous paper failing to replicate, so he transformed into a digital graffiti artist, spamming the board daily in protest. Everyone complained about him—except for one lone champion, whose stylistic tics and particular obsessions made it painfully obvious who was really typing.

Most bizarre was the husband of a once prominent researcher who created a fake identity to defend his wife's honour, only to be immediately recognized by someone else in our community who actually knew the person he was impersonating. The whole experience was every bit as stupefying as anything you'd see in Los Angeles County.

Perhaps the most absurd aspect of moderating PsychMAP, though, was receiving private messages from tenured professors—grownups with PhDs and fancy job titles—tattling on each other like middle schoolers. “So-and-so is being mean to me!” “Did you see what he posted?” “Can you please intervene?”

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Looking back, maybe none of this should have been surprising. This was no ordinary moment. PsychMAP formed precisely when our field's foundations were collapsing in real time. Many couldn't process how they'd contributed to psychology's dismal record; denial was rampant.

As much as I wished people could talk openly and dispassionately about theirs and other’s research, I now see that I was naïve. Put yourself in the position of a scholar in the twilight of their career, suddenly learning that the methods they used to draw inferences and write all those famous papers are now being called research malpractice, possibly even fraud. Wouldn't you fight to preserve what you believed was true—and to protect your legacy?

But even without a legacy to worry about, the instinct for self-preservation runs deep. That’s why even the most impartial criticism of one’s work feels like a personal attack. It is simply too easy to conflate legitimate criticism with bullying. I was foolish to believe people could readily be objective about their own research. In the abstract, we all considered ourselves rational truth-seekers above petty biases. In practice, when our papers get criticized, even kindly and with an even hand, it fucking hurts.

After a year of this madness, I quit moderating and left the group entirely. I just couldn’t take it anymore. All the fighting got to me, and I just wanted to go to my own little corner and stop playing referee.

Things are much calmer today. The reformers won—methodological changes once deemed radical are now mainstream, and many vocal critics hold positions of power.

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But I do wonder if psychology's revolution could have been bloodless. In a recent conversation, my friend Eli Finkel noted that this tension between incremental and revolutionary change characterizes many transformative movements. Perhaps PsychMAP's failure wasn't in attempting moderation, but in my belief that reform could happen purely through civil discourse. Status quo defenders have too much invested in being right; some only change when pushed harder than polite conversation allows. Can radical transformation ever happen without metaphorical bloodshed? In my more honest moments, I suspect not.

The replication wars are now mostly behind us. We've grown thicker skin as a field and normalized criticism—science's essential self-correction mechanism. Looking at the unmoderated hellscape of Twitter today, I've gained new appreciation for the value of moderation, even if we were a bit heavy-handed. Sometimes you need to be told to shut the fuck up, Donny.

But I still wouldn't moderate PsychMAP again. There aren't enough White Russians in the world to make me deal with another sock puppet named Jasmine Bond.

[1] Much to my surprise, PsychMAP is still around, though it does not look to be a bumping place anymore. I have no idea if it is still moderated.

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First, numerous essays were widely read but didn’t generate any real disagreement. So even though I live for conflict, I’ll take it as a win. To my surprise, hardly anyone batted an eye when I suggested that academic contests like selecting which students deserve grants or deciding which faculty applicants to move from a longlist to a shortlist would be better done by artificial intelligence. My argument was that AI is good at following rubrics and, you know, actually reading the application materials. Humans get swayed by prestige and name recognition far too easily. AI could be explicitly prompted to ignore that. I suspect Claude will be less impressed than I am by a candidate Harvard’s Dan Gilbert vouched for. I consider this a plus.

So, I take the lack of vitriol online or in my comment section to mean that many readers might quietly agree with my argument. If so, would anyone be brave enough to actually recommend AI (with human guidance) to adjudicate, say, applications to the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), which is open for submissions right now? If we blinded applicants and gave AI the SPSP reviewer rubric, would we trust the results of that contest more? Something tells me folks are not even close to ready for this.

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Victória is the first author of a new working paper called The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence. I adore this paper. So much so that I want to claim it as all my own. I talk about it at conferences and invited talks all the time because it illuminates something real about the moment we’re living in. Conversations about AI have stopped being normal conversations. They’re fever-pitched, with people holding strong opinions they sometimes refuse to interrogate. Otherwise smart people lose their minds if someone dares say something appreciative about a technology that is, despite all the hype and doom, normal technology.

Victória’s paper explains why. She shows how attitudes toward AI have shifted from mere preferences into something moral, something good-versus-evil. I’ll say no more, because her own words are all you need.

Before I go, a few words about Victória herself. She is not merely brilliant…

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A year ago I wrote an essay arguing that we’ve turned reading into a moral virtue when it’s really just one good way among many to spend an afternoon. I still believe that. So I’m republishing it today for you all to enjoy.

Please tell me why I’m wrong in the comments!

I'm about to commit academic heresy.

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I love books. One of my peak memories remains lounging at a café in Split, Croatia, lost in a non-fiction paperback while hearing the murmur of people walking by in the quaint old town. As a child and adolescent, I would escape the world with books, typically fantasy or science fiction. Later in university, I got a taste for more “respectable” literature, though of late I have returned to my love of epic fantasy, unashamed. Reading, in other words, is my idea of paradise.

And yet.

I can't help but wonder: why do we treat reading for pleasure as inherently virtuous? Why do we look down on those who prefer Netflix to novels?

I feel this tension acutely as a parent. Despite all those nights reading to my (then) young children, despite trying every trick imaginable (including, yes, literally paying them to read like some economist's experiment), they've grown into teenagers who do not read books that are not assigned to them in class. I feel like I've screwed up, as if my kids' disinterest in books reflects some parenting failure.

But maybe the real failure is turning reading itself into some kind of moral virtue, as if the medium we use to absorb ideas and stories matters more than what we learn from them.

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And when I write that “we” treat reading as a moral virtue, I really mean “I.” I look down on people who don’t read, or even who don’t read enough. I mean, I even sort of judge people who “read” via audiobook instead of text. What a prick! But I also know that I’m not alone in my prickishness: there is a growing panic about young people, even at elite universities, who don’t read.

We didn’t always moralize reading, though. In fact, some of history's greatest thinkers were deeply skeptical of it. Plato warned that reading and writing would erode people’s memory capacities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was genuine moral panic about novel reading, particularly among women; unlike today, though, that panic was over people reading too much. Critics worried that books would corrupt minds, inflame passions, and waste precious time that could be spent on more virtuous pursuits.

Perhaps reading came to be seen as virtuous when it was perceived as a marker of class and education. For much of the 20th century, literacy, and especially recreational reading, was a privilege of the leisure class. As historian Jonathan Rose has demonstrated, some working-class readers did seek out serious literature, but they were often exceptions. For most, losing yourself in a novel remained a luxury requiring time, money, and a quiet space—things in short supply for people working long hours.

This hierarchy of reading material still haunts us. I remember browsing a used bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island during my grad school days, puzzled by their separate sections for fiction and literature. I guess what the bookstore was trying to convey was that some books were for entertainment, others for enlightenment. Never mind that this distinction often mapped perfectly onto class lines: mass market paperbacks for the masses, hardcover books for the private-school set.

Even today, we maintain an unspoken hierarchy of passive pursuits that feels suspiciously like old class distinctions. Reading literary fiction and serious nonfiction sits at the top of this prestige pyramid. Below that, we might grudgingly accept so-called prestige television or arthouse cinema (yes, you’re allowed to admit you watched Severance or love impenetrable David Lynch films). Then comes reading other books: fiction, thrillers, fantasy. Further down, we find regular TV and movies. And at the bottom, despite their complex narratives and problem-solving demands, video games.

Of course, this pyramid doesn’t just track medium, but also content. A person reading a trashy romance (or my beloved epic fantasy) might still be outranked by someone who streamed a Yorgos Lanthimos film and nodded solemnly while Emma Stone wandered around nude for the fifteenth time. But the broader structure still holds: we respect reading not necessarily because it’s more enriching, but because educated people have been respecting it for generations.

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Let me be clear about what I'm questioning here. I'm not challenging the value of literacy or the clear link between reading ability and academic achievement. What I'm puzzling over is why, once we're past our formal education, we still treat curling up with a book as inherently more virtuous than other leisure activities.

I decided to ask ChatGPT why reading is important, and it regurgitated some standard talking points: Reading improves cognitive function! Builds empathy! Reduces stress! You know the claims. But when you actually dig into the research, the evidence is surprisingly flimsy.

Take that seductive claim that reading fiction makes you more empathic. This idea exploded about a decade ago, with headlines that would make a grifter take careful notes. The BBC, for example, suggested reading could make you a better person—as if reading Macbeth could transform you into someone morally spotless.

But like so many findings from that era of psychology, these studies haven't exactly aged well. New information has come to light, man. Whether you're looking at forensic statistical analyses or attempted replications, the evidence keeps coming up short. I checked in with my friend Raymond Mar about this—he's a professor at York University and basically the expert on this stuff. His take? While reading fiction over years might nudge your empathy dial up a bit, there's nothing magical about books. TV shows and movies seem to work just as well. Of course, it probably depends more on the story’s content than the medium. There are trashy books and brilliant TV shows, and vice versa. Raymond tells me that as long as the story invites you to think about other minds, it seems to do the job, whether it’s printed on paper or streaming on HBO.

Sorry, book snobs. Yes, me too.

And those vaunted cognitive benefits? Sure, reading engages our brains, but so does trying to assemble IKEA furniture or having a heated debate about who makes the better bagels—sorry New Yorkers, Montreal bagels are obviously superior. The evidence that reading specifically fights off cognitive decline or boosts working memory isn't particularly compelling.

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Yes, books are fantastic learning tools. But let's not pretend they're the only game in town. These days, you can learn from podcasts, documentaries, long-form articles, or even (gasp!) YouTube tutorials. Which brings me to a personal example: why should I judge my kids for learning cooking basics from TikTok instead of cracking open celebrity chef Matty Matheson’s latest cookbook? (Fun fact: I live next door to Matty!)

There is also the notion that reading is an active form of leisure. Yes, reading does require you pay attention, move your eyeballs, and to generate your own mental imagery, but is that really more active than playing a complex video game or watching a film? When I'm truly absorbed in a good book, it doesn't feel effortful at all; I'm just as passively consuming the story as I would be watching a great movie. There’s one important difference: books stop when you stop. They don’t keep playing in the background while you scroll Instagram. That demand for sustained attention might be part of the magic. Reading doesn’t allow your attention to drift in the same way as movies or TV (though, neither do video games). It asks you to stay with it, to resist distraction. And maybe that’s exactly why we value it.

Sustaining attention, after all, is effortful. Reading takes more discipline than watching a movie, at least to start and to persist. And I wonder if the effort cost of reading makes it seem more important and meaningful.

In a paper just published from my lab, my industrious student Aidan Campbell found a connection between how hard something feels and how meaningful we appraise it to be. It’s the same reason we value the imperfect IKEA furniture we build over the perfect IKEA furniture we get built for us. In a separate, newish paper, Aidan found that effortful activities detract from pleasure at the same time that they add to perceived meaning. In other words, we might not necessarily enjoy reading that Faulkner novel, but we’ll think we accomplished something important after doing so. So, do we value reading because it’s harder than the alternatives? Is it a story we tell ourselves to justify the hard work we put in?

Our collective attitude toward audiobooks is telling. While we've grown more accepting of them, there's still a subtle hierarchy where "real" reading ranks above listening. But why? If the goal is absorbing and engaging with ideas, why does it matter whether those ideas enter through our eyes or ears? One reason might be attention: it’s easier to let your mind wander during an audiobook than when staring at a page that doesn’t advance itself. The audiobook skepticism suggests our reverence for reading might be more about the perceived virtue of effort than actual outcomes.

The more I think about it, perhaps what we need isn't a defense of reading, but a more honest conversation about why we've loaded this particular leisure activity with so much moral and social significance.

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Sure, we all look down on the Love Island USA viewer (unfairly or not), but even among high-quality, complex content, we still elevate the reader. Someone working through the latest Margaret Atwood novel is generally seen as more intellectually or morally serious than someone watching House of the Dragon, even if both are engaging with rich, layered storytelling. Perhaps we can acknowledge that someone who never reads books for pleasure but devours thoughtful podcasts, engages with complex games, or critically analyzes film isn't intellectually inferior to a bookworm.

I’ll keep reading because I love it. But I’m going to try my best not to judge others who spend their leisure time doing something else. If the medium doesn’t consistently lead to better outcomes, then maybe what we’re really defending isn’t reading itself, but the cultural halo we’ve built around it.

Maybe it feels good to think we’re better than the screen watchers. But what if we’re not?

That would mean our issues would be more or less settled, and I could continue to conduct normal science. But recently I had a set of experiences that made it clear that our issues are not settled. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at The Ohio State University, and the question period and private discussions after gave me whiplash.

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I delivered my talk at Ohio State’s new Chase Center for Civics, one of these new conservative-leaning civics centers popping up across American campuses. The political bent of the audience is an important detail here. I talked about my lab’s work on moralization, mostly an analysis of news headlines and polling of Americans on their views. The details are unimportant, save to say the research was mostly descriptive, and we’ve replicated parts of it already.

One of the first questions came from Hollis Robbins, a very impressive professor of English at the University of Utah, who also served as a dean at various universities for nearly a decade. Her question was direct: “Why should I trust anything you say?” At first, I was taken aback, uncertain how to respond to a brilliant woman doubting the results of basic polling. But then she mentioned the new Nature replication paper, which showed that attempts to replicate basic social science findings succeeded only about half the time—a paper I know well, as I am one of its (many) authors. She was wondering why she should trust anything I say because I work in a field that’s generally unreplicable. I suspect many conservatives feel the same way. And honestly, after the past few weeks, I’m starting to think they have a point.

I’m writing this angry. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve watched senior colleagues, in private but also in print and on social media, treat the past decade of methods reforms as a sort of overreaction. It’s 2026, but the past weeks have given me flashbacks to 2016’s greatest hits: accusations that replications were poorly executed, failed replications blamed on hidden moderators, social media drama that construes a defense of criticism as a defense of bullying.

I’m fucking angry.

Angry enough to name names. Paid subscribers get the rest.

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Several professors in the audience shared my concerns and asked tough but respectful questions that gave the student pause. The student’s advisor probably should have pushed them harder before the talk, but in the room itself, other professors did what academia is supposed to do: they productively challenged a student to think more carefully about their work. A normal day at a university. And I’m glad to see normal days again, because for a while there, they weren’t.

In recent years, a strange norm took hold. Critical feedback from someone with more power directed at someone with less became suspect, an example of punching down. Critiquing student work was a professor’s job, sure, b…

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Yes, a post by a mid-career psychology professor with a modest social media following was being widely circulated, discussed, liked…and loathed. This was a disorienting experience, but honestly kind of fun.

The post crossed 500,000 views within 24 hours. Every time I checked my socials, I kept on seeing lots and lots of engagement. I clicked on what was trending that day and my little post was there. I screenshotted it immediately because I assumed it would vanish.

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It didn’t vanish. And my post wasn’t ratioed either. But lots of people disagreed and they didn’t mind being loud and angry and sometimes unhinged in expressing their disagreement. I want to talk about it. But, because I’ll be dishing more than doing science, I’m putting this behind a paywall. Among the replies: someone who wanted me lined up at the guillotine, a eugenics comparison, and a surprisingly good philosophical argument. I want to talk about all three.

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The Power of Us

We share science and the stories about social identity, group dynamics, and collective behavior in organizations and society. Hosted in collaboration with the Center for Conflict & Cooperation.

By Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

I've known Dominic and Jay for over 20 years. We first met when they were both graduate students at the University of Toronto and I was a visiting speaker. I left that visit energized and, frankly, jealous. The intellectual culture in the psychology department was exactly what I'd been looking for—lively, rigorous, genuinely curious. I applied for a job at UofT a few weeks later and have been here ever since.

But as I reflect on my remarkable visit and the wonderful time I had, I realize that Jay and Dominic played an outsized role. A major reason I found the culture so stimulating is that I found Jay and Dominic so stimulating—they loved discussing ideas, were open to different perspectives, and liked lively debate. I was later amazed by how varacious a reader Dominic was and is and how charismatic and curious Jay was and is. I am now convinced the reas…

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I wrote the piece below about 18 months ago. A few weeks ago, my friends Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel republished it in their newsletter, The Power of Us, under the title “The Downfall of Stereotype Threat.” That republication landed in the inbox of roughly 10,000 people, which is fine. What happened next is more interesting.

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Mary Murphy, a prominent stereotype threat researcher, wrote a lengthy public rebuttal on her own Substack, taking issue with my conclusions and the timing of the republication. She makes some arguments I want to engage with seriously, and maybe I will in a future post. This isn’t the place for that. But I will say this: Mary's rebuttal left me wondering when stereotype threat stopped being about the Black-White or male-female testing gaps and started being about how people feel in uncomfortable rooms. Vibes, basically. Important vibes, yes, but vibes nonetheless. If that’s where we’ve landed, that’s worth talking about.

For now, I'm putting the original piece behind the paywall, with a few small additions. If you're a free subscriber and want access, now is a good time to upgrade. You'll get the essay, the drama, and eventually my response to Mary. Consider this your warning that things might get a little spicy.

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There was a well-attended session asking whether SPSP is a healthy scientific organization, a presenter who had enough chutzpah to deliver his talk using 100% AI-generated slides, and a heartfelt memorial for a dearly departed psychologist. I’m going to get personal and name some names, so I’m putting this behind a paywall to give me the freedom I want and you, the gossip you expect.

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But for others, conferences are a source of anxiety and despair. They invite all kinds of upwards social comparisons—there is always someone better than you doing more interesting research no matter how well established or how cool your research is—that leave one deflated. And then there are all those people to talk to!

Because conference season is here, I thought I’d reprint (with light edits) my essay on what conferences are really for (hint: it it not to learn about the latest research) and how to do it well even if small talk is not really your thing.

Conference season is here, and I can feel the electric buzz of anticipation in academia's virtual hallways.

I’m heading to Chicago for the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), where I won’t be presenting anything but there to soak in the atmosphere of the world’s largest gathering of social and personality psychologists. If you’re there, come say hi!

Whether it’s SPSP, APS, CNS, SAS, or any other acronym-filled gathering, conferences can be overwhelming. For junior researchers, especially, the experience of seeing your academic heroes stroll by—knowing you should strike up a conversation but feeling too anxious to—is all too familiar. You wonder: Why would she even want to talk to me?

That anxious knot in your stomach? It’s likely tricking you into overestimating how awkward those interactions will be. Research by Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder shows we chronically underestimate how much others enjoy talking to us; and how much we’ll enjoy those conversations, too. Small talk may have a bad reputation, but it’s usually a lot less painful (and a lot more enjoyable) than we expect, even if you don’t think you’re a pro at it.

Yet, despite this, we cling to our phones like they’re shields, pretending to check emails while secretly praying that the person who just made eye contact doesn’t actually come over. We convince ourselves that everyone is too busy, too important, or too uninterested to talk to us. But, you’re also silently hoping someone else will break the ice so you can stop pretending to be absorbed in the same email you’ve skimmed three times already.

And here’s the twist: those small, seemingly inconsequential interactions? They’re the main reason you’re at the conference. So, let’s clear up a major misconception: the goal of a conference isn’t to attend every talk and absorb every bit of information. It’s about connecting with ideas, with potential collaborators, and yes, with those strangers you’re too nervous to approach.

If you want pure information, read the papers or let an AI summarize them for you. Conferences are about people—meeting them, talking to them, and, most importantly, forming connections that go beyond academic citations. This is why online conferences, for all their accessibility, were a bust. They missed the whole point: building relationships.

If your idea of a conference is to fly in, give your talk, and fly out, you're doing it wrong. You’re like a child wondering into the middle of a movie.

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Let me tell you a story about why these connections matter. A few years ago, I hired a postdoc named Blair Saunders, now a professor at the University of Dundee. Blair’s application stood out not just because of his brilliance but because I had already met him. Months earlier, at a pub event after a conference talk in New Orleans, Blair saw me wrestling with a neon-colored Hurricane (a truly deadly concoction) and mustered the courage to chat. We discovered shared research interests, and when his CV crossed my desk later, I already knew he was thoughtful and engaging. That conversation over a drink made him more than just another name in a stack of applications.

Here's something they don't tell you enough of in grad school: the most successful academics aren't just brilliant researchers; they're also skilled networkers. I know, I know: the word "networking" probably makes you cringe. It sounds calculated, maybe even a bit sleazy. But these personal connections matter more than you think. They lead to collaborations, job opportunities, chapter invitations, and symposium spots. But more importantly, they make this whole academic endeavor more enjoyable.

OK, so how does one network?

First, ditch your university crew. I know it feels safe traveling in packs, but those gaggles of grad students from the same labs or departments? No one's approaching that fortress of familiarity. Instead, work in pairs at most. One conference buddy is ideal; you've got backup but you're still approachable.

Next, be ready for the inevitable “What do you study?” question. Have a concise three-sentence version for casual chats and a longer version for when someone is genuinely interested. And don’t forget to ask real questions yourself; not setups to pivot back to your own work, but genuine, thoughtful inquiries. If you’re nervous about sounding dumb, don’t be. Most speakers love questions, even simple ones. If you are anxious still, have a go-to question you can ask multiple people (mine used to be about individual differences that they believed could moderate their effect of interest).

Be strategic. Skim the program ahead of time and prioritize talks and posters that genuinely interest you. Then, make a point to chat with presenters afterward, especially grad students, who are often thrilled to have someone engage with their work.

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Another way to be strategic is to email people in advance. Maybe you noticed that a few professors you admire are going to attend. Why not send them a brief email expressing how much you admire them and their work and then ask if they could meet for 15 minutes over coffee. Several students have reached out to me in the past, and I usually say yes to a brief meeting because I’m human and while I want to help them, I really like it when people like me and my work! Yes, flattery works.

Here's something else: hang out with your advisor strategically. It’s a long story, but I did not have a social psychology advisor during grad school (my advisor was a cognitive psychologist). So, when I went to conferences, I had no one to open social doors for me. But advisors can and should do this. So, ask your advisors to introduce you to people they know—that's literally part of their job. And when they do, don't just stand there nodding. Join the conversation. And follow up with these people later.

And don’t skip the social events. Yes, the poster sessions and talks matter, but the real networking happens over drinks and food. This is where job leads, collaborations, and friendships are born.

Here’s a hack most people overlook: volunteer for everything. Seriously, everything. Hand out name badges. Join student committees. Help review poster submissions. These seemingly mundane tasks are networking gold mines. You’ll get face time with other academics, and the connections you make can pay off years later.

One last bit of advice: Try acting extroverted. Yes, I know that sounds terrifying, but research shows it can make you happier and more likable. When you engage enthusiastically with others, when you smile and act assertively, they tend to mirror that energy back, creating a positive feedback loop that makes everyone feel good. It's like a social chain reaction that benefits both sides.

So, if you see me at your next conference, come say hi. I’m the short, bearded, bald guy wearing a Big Lebowski t-shirt under a blazer. And who knows? That awkward small talk might just be the start of something big.

I hoped—prayed, even—I would never have to write about research on ego depletion again. But then a new paper comes along that forces me to take notice. And now I feel obliged to say something.

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I won’t go through the whole sordid story; not only is it a long one, but I’ve recounted it a few times already in different venues, including right here in this Substack. So, here is the Cliff’s Notes version.

Ego depletion was social psychology’s golden child for nearly two decades. People went gaga over the idea that self-control runs on a limited resource that depletes with use. Resist that cookie now, fail at the gym later. Simple and intuitive, but ultimately unsupported by strong evidence. The cracks in the resource model of self-control, as it came to be known, appeared in the early 2010s. First came theoretical problems (what exactly was this so-called resource?), then came replication failures. The death blow arrived with not one but tw…

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But I’m no longer convinced that was the responsible choice. Like Paul Bloom, I am starting to wonder if not using AI in such cases is the right thing to do.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I have little confidence in the quality of my comparative judgments, even in my grading of a pile of student papers. I know my evaluations are skewed by whether a candidate came first or last in the pile, whether I am in a good mood or nursing a headache. I usually get a feeling about a paper or candidate and then just go on vibes. I’ve been doing this for decades, and every time I finish, I’m left with the nagging feeling that I’ve made tons of mistakes or that I have been unfair. Yet we trust humans like me to do this kind of work. And some of us would be horrified if we learned that a colleague outsourced some of this work to AI

Yet, if I had a well-written rubric with specific criteria, I’m pretty sure AI would do a better job than I would. It would be more consistent, less biased by irrelevant factors, and certainly not influenced by whether the Eagles are playing on the radio while it’s grading.

This bothers me. A lot. It made me think back to a piece I wrote last year about predictive AI, and why I think the anti-AI crowd has it wrong. So here is that essay again, with just a few edits.

It’s fashionable these days to be anti-AI. If you don’t believe me, check out this social media mob that tore into my University of Toronto colleague for having the audacity to promote an AI-powered educational tool.

Critics are right to call out the serious problems with AI, like biases in U.S. healthcare decisions, discriminatory fraud detection in the Netherlands, or even error-prone search results. These issues are real and demand attention.

But bias, discrimination, and errors aren’t unique to AI; they’re deeply embedded in human decision-making, too. If you think humans are the gold standard, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Our judgments are inconsistent, riddled with bias, and nearly impossible to fix. The real question isn’t whether predictive AI is perfect, but whether it’s better than the messy systems we’re already using. Spoiler: it usually is.

That question—whether AI is an improvement over the status quo—was on my mind when I picked up AI Snake Oil, a book by Princeton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. The title alone promised a scathing critique of the technology, and I wanted to see if their arguments would challenge my perspective. Was I just an unapologetic AI stan after all? Determined to keep an open mind, I dove in, ready to hear from experts. The authors didn’t disappoint in their skepticism. They didn’t just criticize AI; they came out swinging.

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The book covers a lot of ground, and I found the chapter on the history of AI especially enlightening. I learned a ton. But when they turned to evaluating the technology itself, the gloves came off. To their credit, they acknowledge AI’s strengths in areas like autocomplete, chatbots, and even some uses of generative AI for coding and images. But when it comes to predictive AI, their critique takes a sharp turn. They don’t just find flaws. They call for the outright abandonment of predictive AI—if not of prediction altogether.

This is where I part ways with them. Prediction itself, even if flawed, is essential. Decisions need to be made. Who gets admitted to an ICU when there aren’t enough beds? Who is likely to reoffend and should not be released on parole? Who gets hired for a job when there are hundreds of applicants? Prediction is how we allocate scarce resources, prioritize care, and maintain justice and fairness.

But what do we mean by prediction here? Prediction is about using data to anticipate outcomes and guide decisions in structured ways. For instance, it could mean predicting which ICU patient is likeliest to recover, which parolee poses the least risk, or which refugee might face persecution if returned to their home country. Prediction isn’t about certainty—it’s about estimating probabilities to make decisions that matter.

These decisions are high-stakes, and without prediction, they’d often become arbitrary, relying on gut feelings or flawed human judgment. AI enhances this process by handling complexity, processing massive datasets, and reducing bias. It doesn’t eliminate the challenges of prediction, but it allows us to make better, more consistent decisions than humans alone. This is why prediction isn’t just essential—it’s unavoidable.

When it comes to making better decisions, research makes it clear that algorithms are the way to go. The term algorithm gets thrown around like it’s synonymous with computers and AI, but it originally had nothing to do with machines. An algorithm is simply a set of steps or rules used to make a decision. We could create and implement one with nothing more than a pencil and paper.

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Take graduate admissions. Instead of relying on unstructured interviews where we decide based on whether we like someone or deem them a good fit, we could create a decision rule. Assign each applicant a score out of 10 on criteria like undergraduate grades, research experience, writing ability, math skills, ability to work with others, even likability. Then, give each criterion a weight, say, 25% for grades, 15% for likability and so on. A little algebra later, and you’ve combined the scores to compare candidates and select the highest-scoring ones. Congratulations! You’ve just created and implemented an algorithm. It’s not perfect, but it’s far more objective and less biased than gut feelings or intuition.

I know this from personal experience. When I evaluate students or job candidates—which I do regularly—I can feel my judgments shifting based on completely irrelevant factors. The same application looks different if I read it first thing or its the last application in my pile. A candidate who reminds me of a former successful student gets an unfair boost. Someone whose writing style annoys me gets dinged for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual qualifications. An algorithm doesn't have these problems.

And this isn’t like just my opinion, man. Decades of research shows these kinds of algorithms consistently outperform so-called holistic human decision-making. Yet we resist them. Maybe it’s because we trust our intuition or clinical judgment too much, or maybe it’s because we balk at the idea of reducing people to a number. However, intuition simply isn’t good enough when the stakes are high. We tell ourselves we’re seeing the so-called whole person when we rely on holistic judgment, but in reality, we’re influenced by irrelevant factors that cloud our thinking. Was the candidate too dressed up? Not dressed up enough? Did they hesitate too long before answering? Did they answer too quickly? Were they sweating and nervous? Or maybe too blasé? And, of course, there’s the baggage of stereotypes—conscious or unconscious—that shapes how we perceive people, no matter how hard we try to suppress them. Algorithms aren’t flawless, but they don’t care about any of this nonsense, which is why they consistently outperform human judgment.

For instance, in hiring, unstructured interviews are less predictive of job performance than algorithmic assessments based on structured data. And it's not just hiring—it's any evaluation task where we're comparing people against defined criteria: student admissions, fellowship awards, job applications, promotion decisions. In all these domains, human evaluators show alarming inconsistency. We're influenced by attractiveness, by whether someone's name is easy to pronounce, by whether we're tired or hungry or distracted. We tell ourselves we're good at this, that our years of experience have honed our judgment, but the data says otherwise.

Algorithms, in contast, don’t suffer from these biases. For example, in parole decisions, machine learning models have shown they can reduce errors where parole boards unnecessarily incarcerate low-risk individuals while releasing higher-risk individuals. These examples highlight how algorithms can improve fairness and accuracy by mitigating the biases and inconsistencies of human judgment.

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AI builds on these algorithms, making them faster, scalable, and, when designed well, less biased. And scalability matters because there are more decisions and predictions to make than humans can handle, even if they used algorithms themselves. Take refugee claims in Canada. In 2023, over 260,000 people sought asylum—six to seven times as many as just a few years earlier. Every claim needs to be processed and assessed, yet the system is so overwhelmed it takes the government about four years to make a decision. In the meantime, these claimants live precariously, unsure if they’ll be accepted or deported. Automated algorithms—yes, I’m talking about AI here—could process this data more efficiently and accurately, even if it makes mistakes. Unlike humans, AI doesn’t burn out, get distracted, or let a bad morning cloud its judgment.

Yet AI Snake Oil relentlessly attacks AI for not being perfect, pointing out its mistakes as if they invalidate the entire enterprise. But this critique misses the point: AI shouldn’t be judged against some platonic ideal—it should be judged against what we’re doing now, which is far worse. Humans are inconsistent, irrational, and riddled with biases we don’t even realize we have. The bums always lose when they rely on gut feelings and flawed intuition. We also make mistakes, and more of them.

At one point, the authors discuss how AI can be gamed. For example, candidates in automated video job interviews might use fancy words they’d never normally use, like “conglomerate” (is that really a fancy word or have I just been in the Ivory Tower for too many years?) or strategically place books and paintings in the background to score higher. Sure, this is unfair. Pretending to have a strong vocabulary or curating your background says little about your actual ability to do a job. But this kind of gaming happens all the time in real life too. I once had a friend with perfect vision who wore fake prescription glasses to a job interview because she thought it made her look smarter and older, and thus more hirable. Defendants in court wear suits to seem respectable and trustworthy. Anytime you construct a decision rule, people will find ways to exploit its weaknesses. That’s not unique to AI.

Consider an important study by Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues, published in Science. They found racial bias in a healthcare algorithm that underestimated the health needs of Black patients compared to White patients. The bias stemmed from the algorithm’s reliance on healthcare costs as a proxy for need, which systematically disadvantaged Black patients because they, on average, incurred lower healthcare expenses—not because they were healthier, but because they faced systemic barriers to accessing care. But here’s the crucial part: the bias wasn’t hidden. Researchers identified the problem, reformulated the algorithm, and effectively eliminated the bias. Good luck doing that with human decision-making. This is what happens, Larry. When humans make biased decisions, we rarely know why—let alone how to fix it.

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To be fair, AI Snake Oil raises important concerns about how AI is implemented. Algorithms need high-quality training data—garbage in, garbage out. AI decision rules should be made transparent and understandable to stakeholders. Systems must be rigorously tested to ensure they are an actual improvement over current practice. And algorithms need to be adaptable, tailored to the populations and environments they’re used in. These are real challenges, and AI companies and the organizations that use their products need to do better.

Still, the authors take their skepticism of predictive AI too far for my taste. They suggest replacing prediction (AI and human alike) with lotteries.

Imagine that. Instead of a parole board—whether relying on human or AI judgment—deciding whether a prisoner should be granted parole, we’d toss their name into a hat and let fate decide [1].

The reality is that prediction is essential. Lotteries can sometimes make sense, say when equity is the primary goal, or when there’s little-to-no predictive ability. Some argue, for example, that academia’s grant system is so poor at predicting high quality research that distributing research funding by lottery might actually be an improvement.

But when decisions have real consequences—like who gets parole, who gets hired, or who needs extra care—randomness isn’t enough. Prediction allows us to systematically analyze and use data to account for meaningful differences between people, such as their likelihood of rehabilitation, job performance, or recovery. This ensures decisions are informed by relevant factors rather than arbitrary guesswork or biases. Refusing to predict doesn’t make decisions fairer; it just makes them arbitrary. When lives, resources, or justice are on the line, we need to make the best decisions we can. AI isn’t perfect, but it helps us get closer.

AI isn’t snake oil; it’s a tool. It’s a flawed tool, sure, but one with incredible potential. It forces us to confront the inefficiencies and biases in our current systems, exposing problems we’ve ignored for too long and offering solutions we didn’t think were possible. Perfect? No. An improvement over the status quo? Yes.

[1] To be fair, the authors suggest lotteries after some initial selection process. By allowing for even some selection, however, the authors reveal that we and AI might have some predictive ability after all.

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Nearly every Jew I know—no matter their political beliefs or ideological commitments—has had to reckon with how their ethnic/religious/cultural group is now perceived. For many like me, this is a new thing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I grew up in a golden age of Jew tolerance, where Jew hatred was something I learned about from dusty textbooks or my father’s and uncle’s stories of Living While Jewish in Europe. Sure, I witnessed some acts of hate—in 1987, my synagogue in suburban Montreal was graffitied with swastikas and the phrase “Burn Jews”—but this was the exception. I never thought my Judaism made a lick of difference in how I was treated.

That carefree sense of psychological (and even physical) safety is no longer. The god damned plane has crashed into the mountain. I got a taste for this on October 8^th, 2023, when demonstrators on the streets and campuses of North America’s finest cities were telling Jews …

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Today I am reposting my love letter to my favourite movie of all time. I might just make this an annual tradition. Enjoy your time off, taking it easy for us all sinners. And if you’re in Toronto for New Year’s Eve and want to usher in the new year abiding, might I recommend you catch a screening of TBL at the Hot Docs Cinema. Thanks to my student Emily Zohar who let me in on this annual tradition.

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Merry Christmas everyone. Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to greet you with a generic Happy Holidays, but today is Christmas day, so merry Christmas it is.

I’ve always loved Christmas, which is a strange thing for a Jew to say. But what’s not to like? I love the office parties where we get to see our bosses or co-workers in sometimes compromising positions (informational hostages?). I love all the food—panettone anyone? I love the ugly sweaters. And I even love the music—my fave Xmas song has got to be Wham!’s Last Christmas. And, as a Jew, I celebrate the birth of Jesus as it should be celebrated—with other Jews stuffing our faces with Chinese food. In this spirit of giving, I decided to write a lighthearted post about my favourite movie of all time, The Big Lebowski. Think of it as a little Christmas gift for all the Little Urban Achievers out there.

I was one of those rare people who saw The Big Lebowski in a movie theatre when it was first released in 1998. While the movie became a cult classic years later, it bombed with critics and movie goers alike upon its initial release. I was in the first year of my PhD at Brown University and watched the movie with my good friend Terry McGee at the cineplex near the Lincoln Center in New York City.

I liked the movie, but it didn’t leave much of an impression and I found the plot confusing in spots. But some scenes did stay with me because they were so absurd, and when I found myself in a different state of mind (lol), they made me chuckle. Like the scene with the Black cab driver who kicks the Dude out of his cab because the Dude bad-mouthed The Eagles. I too hated (and still hate) The Eagles, so I felt like the filmmakers were speaking to me personally, showing me that my hatred was not so uncommon. Or the scene of Walter smashing a brand-new Corvette while repeatedly invoking the phrase, “You see what happens Larry? This is what happens Larry when you… find a stranger in the Alps!” These were funny scenes, but nothing more.

Then a few months later I heard my friend Kamran Diba—now a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan—quoting a scene, and I was amazed he had seen, let alone liked the movie. Clearly, I had missed something. The movie was out of theatres after a short run but was released on DVD (or was it VHS?) soon thereafter, and Kamran had a copy.

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I watched it with him and my other grad school buddies again. And again. And again. After each viewing, the movie got funnier and deeper and more meaningful. I was in love, smitten with the Dude, Walter, and Donny, but also Maude, Jesus, Bunny, and even Knox Herrington. I started getting into the Coen brothers’ other films. What was more, I learned that other people, mostly other men, also loved the movie and watched it and quoted from it endlessly. I have since bonded with other Lebowski fans the world over and have deepened friendships based on our shared passion.

So why do I and so many other middle-aged Gen X men love this movie so much? I’ll try to explain, though it might be unexplainable—maybe it’s some kind of eastern thing.

Let’s start by crossing one reason off the list: it’s not the plot. The plot is kind of confusing. It took me a few watches to untangle it, and when I finally got it, I realized my thinking about it had been far too uptight. The truth is the plot doesn’t really matter. Even Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers, admitted it’s a “hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” But for those whose minds are not sufficiently limber, here’s a summary to help you abide.

Spoiler Alert (Brief Plot Summary)

Loosely inspired by the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, The Big Lebowski centers on Jeffrey Lebowski, better known as The Dude, who is mistaken for a wealthy philanthropist by the same name. This other Jeffrey Lebowski, the millionaire, is the big Lebowski. After thugs invade the Dude’s home and ruin his cherished rug, The Dude confronts the big Lebowski, only to be drawn into a bizarre scheme when the man claims his wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped. The Dude reluctantly agrees to deliver a $1 million ransom, roping in his volatile bowling buddy Walter Sobchak, who is rarely wrong but always an asshole, and the soft-spoken Donny, who is always out of his element. It’s eventually revealed that Bunny wasn’t kidnapped at all. She staged the disappearance herself, working with a group of nihilists to pocket the ransom. To make matters worse, the big Lebowski was never actually rich, living off a strict allowance from his late wife’s family, and had no intention of paying the ransom in the first place. What unfolds is a chaotic, absurd series of events where no one truly wins, but The Dude, ever unbothered, simply abides.

Again, the plot is not the issue. Forget about the plot.

So why do I love thee? Let me count the ways

1. I love the characters

First, there’s The Dude, played with effortless charm by Jeff Bridges, who somehow manages to make laziness seem heroic. The Dude gets all the love because he is easy going, carefree, tender-hearted, and quick to light a joint pretty much anywhere. He loves the band Creedence Clearwater Revival, bowling, and appears to have been unemployed for quite some time. In short, he’s a lovable 60s hippy burnout, who wears jelly shoes and Cowichan sweaters. (My awesome student Greg Depow, now postdoc at UCSD, once gifted me with a Cowichan sweater, and it is one of my prized possessions to this day). Jeff Bridges apparently strongly identifies with the Dude, too. In interviews, he’s mentioned that he sees a lot of himself in the character and has admitted to enjoying the occasional White Russian and being a bit of a hippie at heart. Bridges has also embraced the cultural phenomenon that The Dude has become.

Everyone loves the Dude. But the soul of the movie belongs to his best friend Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman. Walter is a Vietnam vet who takes everything far too seriously, from bowling league rules to his ex-wife’s dog to being shomer Shabbos. His unhinged intensity is the perfect foil to The Dude’s laid-back apathy. His outbursts—whether he’s shouting, “You’re out of your element, Donny!” or “Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?!”—are the stuff of legend.

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Then there’s hapless Donny, played with understated brilliance by Steve Buscemi. Donny spends most of the movie like a deer in the headlights, perpetually confused and constantly interrupted by Walter. Nothing captures Donny’s clueless charm better than his classic line, “phone’s ringing, Dude,” spoken with genuine earnestness to a visibly exasperated Dude, who has been very aware of his “mobile” phone ringing for the past 15 minutes.

Who can forget Maude Lebowski, played with eccentric brilliance by Julianne Moore? A feminist avant-garde artist with a flair for commanding every scene she’s in; Maude is equal parts hilarious and intimidating. Whether she’s coolly explaining that her art is strongly vaginal, which makes some men uncomfortable, or laughing maniacally while discussing the Biennale with Sandro, she’s a force of nature—bizarre, self-assured, and utterly unforgettable.

And then there are the minor characters. Jesus Quintana, played to sleazy perfection by John Turturro, struts onto the screen in just two unforgettable scenes, stealing the show with his purple jumpsuit, unsettling trash talk, and the iconic line “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.” Brandt, the big Lebowski’s sycophantic assistant, is brought to life by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose awkward attempts to impress the Dude are cringeworthy yet endearing. Even the nihilists, with their laughable incompetence and bizarre threats of cutting off the Dude’s “Johnson,” leave a lasting impression.

2. I love the eminently quotable lines

I quote The Big Lebowski in nearly every post, and anyone who’s in the know will understand: It’s not just a personal quirk; it’s what we diehard fans do. Put two or more of us in a room together, and within minutes, we’ll be volleying lines back and forth like a game of verbal ping-pong. I mean look at this incredible exchange between eight random people on Reddit each riffing off each other, and it making perfect sense… kind of. This was in response to an image of the big Lebowski, played by the late David Huddleston.

The more obscure the quote, the better. I once went to a party where I only knew a handful of people, but by the end of the night, I had new friends and a deep respect for the guy who casually dropped a line I’d never heard used before: “What are you, a park ranger now?” Instant legend.

Then there are the Talmudic debates over what any one line actually means. Take the Stranger, played to perfection by a mustachioed Sam Elliott. What does he mean when he says he takes comfort in “The Dude takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners”? Is it a profound statement about modern morality—or just a cowboy rambling? And what about this cryptic observation: “Sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, cuz what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man.” Is it a poetic meditation on The Dude’s unique place in the universe? Or does it mean absolutely nothing? What?!

And just when you think you’ve absorbed everything there is to know about The Big Lebowski, the movie surprises you with something new. A few years ago, on a camping trip, my good friend Roy Baskind (host of what has to be the best neurology podcast in the world), his friend Rodney, and I found ourselves in a heated debate over one of Walter’s many memorable lines: “Life does not stop and start at your convenience, you miserable piece of shit.” To me, it’s obvious: Walter is berating Donny for his usual, well-meaning cluelessness. But Rodney passionately argued that Walter is addressing the big Lebowski, whose gift of a beeper had clearly gotten under Walter’s skin. It turns out we hadn’t stumbled upon some hidden gem of Lebowski lore; this quote has been debated by fans for years. Like everything else in this movie, even a single line opens new layers of absurdity and discussion.

3. I love all the cuss words

My father-in-law—hello, Fred!—who also happens to be this Substack’s biggest fan, once expressed concern about all the swearing in my posts. He might as well have quoted the Stranger himself: “Do you have to use so many cuss words?” But Fred, fine man though he is, is not a fellow Little Urban Achiever. He doesn’t realize that whenever I let a swear fly in this Substack, I’m quoting The Big Lebowski. Every single time.

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And let’s be clear: this movie swears. A lot. The word fuck is used 292 times in The Big Lebowski. That averages out to about 2.4 uses per minute, making it quite possibly the sweariest film produced in Los Angeles County, which would place it in the running for sweariest worldwide. It’s not just the frequency but the sheer variety of ways the word fuck is delivered—angry, confused, dismissive, philosophical—that adds to the movie’s charm. Few films have ever used swearing so charmingly.

If you want proof (and a good laugh), here’s a mashup of every single f-bomb in the movie

And that’s why, when I quote from The Big Lebowski, the cuss words are non-negotiable. Without the profanity, the quotes wouldn’t just lose their charm, they’d be unrecognizable. “Who are you, man?” just wouldn’t have the same impact without that f-bomb. The swearing is essential.

4. I love its absurdity

You already know the plot doesn’t matter, but that barely scratches the surface of how bizarre and delightfully absurd The Big Lebowski truly is. Take The Stranger, for instance: who is he? Why is he a cowboy narrating a story about bowling in Los Angeles? And why is he sipping sarsaparilla like it’s 1885? Then there’s The Dude’s landlord, Marty. What on earth was his interpretive dance performance, his “cycle,” his… “what-have-you”? Did they actually put Donny’s ashes in a Folgers coffee can? The movie is a fever dream that never bothers to explain itself, and that’s exactly why it’s brilliant.

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And the musical numbers—what even are those? Valkyries in bowling alleys, Saddam Hussein handing out rental shoes, all set to retro tunes that somehow make it all work. These dreamlike interludes are as ridiculous as they are mesmerizing.

And then there’s the fan culture, which is almost as absurd as the movie itself. There was Lebowski Fest, which started in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2002—a glorious celebration of all things Dude—but sadly, it’s no longer running. Other gatherings, however, have popped up to fill the void. And the merch. Oh, the merch. There used to be a shop in New York City, right around the corner from where I worked at NYU, that sold nothing but Lebowski-themed stuff. My friends know how much I love the movie, so every year I get at least one Lebowski-related gift. Over the years, I’ve received t-shirts, bobblehead dolls, Creedence tapes (yes, actual tapes), talking bowling pins, Lebowski art, sweaters, bowling shirts, and even books. You name it, I’ve probably unwrapped it. There’s even an art project called the Little Lebowski Project, where fans photograph miniature figurines of The Dude and Walter in iconic or bizarre locations around the world.

The absurdity of The Big Lebowski spills over into every aspect of its fandom, making it a phenomenon as strange and endearing as the movie itself. Some fans have even transformed the world of The Big Lebowski into an actual religion: Dudeism. A few years ago, I embraced the absurdity and became an ordained Dudeist priest. Let me know if you need someone to officiate your wedding—I’ll bring my own bathrobe.

So, this Christmas, I hope you’ll accept this love letter as my small token of appreciation for a movie that has brought me endless joy. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to pour yourself a White Russian, settle in, and let The Dude guide you through the chaos. If you don’t love it, watch it three more times. And if you have seen it, well, pour yourself a drink anyway, because the world could always use more people who abide.

To all the Little Urban Achievers out there, I hope this holiday season brings you peace, absurdity, and maybe even a rug that really ties the room together. And to all my Substack readers and subscribers, I appreciate you.

Merry Christmas, man.

To celebrate this Christmas Day ode to The Dude, I’m holding a new Lebowski contest. I’ll comp two lucky winners with a 3-month paid subscription to this Substack—but here’s the catch: the winners will be the ones who come up with the most obscure Lebowski lines or quotes in the first 24 hours. I’m talking about the quotes that I haven’t thought about in years, the deep cuts buried beneath the iconic ones. So think hard, dig deep, and drop your best obscure line in the comments. Bonus points if you do it in your Christmas-day pajamas, White Russian in hand. Let the quoting commence!

This is a sensitive topic for me because of my uncle Shlomo, his personal story, and the tremendous impact he had on my life. He passed away a few years ago, but I remain grateful for all that he taught me over the years. I miss him dearly.

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Every Mother’s Day, I send out two cards: one to my mother in Montreal and one to my second mother in New York City.

My second mother is in reality my aunt, my mother’s eldest sister, Rachella. Because my aunt was born in Yemen, where they did not keep such records, she does not know how old she is or the date of her birth. My family guesses that she might now be 86, and she marks her birthday as the day she immigrated to the US in her early 30s. Rachella has always treated me as a son. Growing up in my chaotic and sometimes unsafe childhood home, Rachella was a beacon of love, a guardian, and the most generous person I know. I love her completely.

Rachella married Shlomo when I was in grade 7, but I had loved him long before. Shlomo instilled in me a love of science; he always lifted me up and encouraged me. He was my role model.

When Shlomo told me he had grown up in Będzin, Poland, in the 1930s, I couldn’t grasp what he meant. When Shlomo spoke of a sister I knew only through faded sepia photographs, I couldn’t grasp what he had lost. And when Shlomo refused to explain the strange numbers etched into his arm, I couldn’t grasp what he had endured. It wasn’t until I was older—until I learned of Auschwitz and its horrors—that I began to understand. At the same age I was playing road hockey with friends, Shlomo was fighting to survive in a world trying to erase him.

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His story didn’t end in tragedy, but it didn’t end easily either. He escaped Europe after spending time in a displaced persons camp with his surviving brother. They both gained passage to the US, where they built new and remarkable lives for themselves. Yet, the scars of his early life never fully healed. He had nightmares until the day he died a few years ago, his sleep haunted by what he endured. He struggled in his relationships, sometimes letting others take advantage of his kindness. Despite his many achievements, he never seemed comfortable in his own skin, as if constantly needing to prove his worth. His survival was a triumph, but it came at a cost he carried for the rest of his life.

So, when I think of Poland, I think of my uncle Shlomo and the tattoo on his arm that he refused to have removed. When I think of Poland, I think of a land that had once been hospitable to Jews.

Yeah, this is going to be another post about Jew hate. I won’t make a habit of it, but I recently visited Poland, where I was giving a university talk, and could not shake my feelings of discomfort while there. I never have the same feelings when I visit Germany, however. I want to use this post to wrestle with why.

Poland once hosted a Jewish population of 3.5 million, often called the “Paradise of the Jews” for its tolerance. By the war’s end, 93% had been exterminated, leaving only 10,000–20,000 Jews today.

The German occupying force was brutal and efficient. The scale of the Germans’ murderous scheming is unparalleled and remains today the epitome of evil. Many Jews today cannot and will not step foot on German soil. My wife, who loves traveling, refuses to visit Germany. Some Jews avoid buying German products. I recall as a high-schooler how my mother’s friend Sophia—a Lebanese Jewish woman all the boys had crushes on—admonishing me for my German-made Faber-Castell eraser. I can still hear her raspy, accented voice explaining how even hearing German being spoken gave her shivers of fear.

Yet, I hold no animus toward Germans today. These are the authors of my father’s grandparents’ murder, but I have forgiven, moved on. Why? Germans did the unthinkable but have since wrestled with and taken responsibility for it. They faced their history with honesty, creating monuments, laws against hate speech, and offering reparations.

I am a forgiving person. I can forgive even the unforgivable. But you need to ask for it, truly and deeply. Germany has done this. And as such, I have no ambivalence when I visit Berlin, Cologne, or Tubingen. I feel comfortable there and truly admire German culture and people.

But Poland…

Let me just say that I feel like an ingrate for writing about these feelings, particularly given the kindness of my Polish hosts. Despite the generosity I received, I couldn’t shake my sense of unease there. Certainly, my uncle Shlomo’s experience and the near-complete annihilation of Polish Jewry explains some of my discomfort. But Poles were also victimized by the Germans. The Nazis occupied Poland and terrorized Poles, who were deported to Germany and sent to forced labour and concentration camps too. The Nazis murdered many, many non-Jewish Polish civilians during the war.

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So why would I feel more comfortable in the land of the oppressors than in the land of the oppressed? Because some Poles were also oppressors. Yes, sometimes victims are also victimizers. Certain factions within Polish society victimized their Jewish neighbours, actively collaborating with the Germans, sometimes enthusiastically.

It is now well-documented that some Poles chose to kill Jews. They actively participated in rounding up their Jewish neighbours, sometimes volunteering their efforts but more often accepting payment to betray their fellow Poles. And after the war, when Europe was liberated, some Poles continued to kill Jews, particularly those who tried to return to their homes, which were often occupied by strangers. In the first year after liberation, more than 1,000 Polish Jews were killed, not by Germans but by the local Polish population. There were still pogroms in Poland after the war, most notably in the city of Kielce.

I could go on. But I won’t. If I were in the same situation as a poor Polish peasant, maybe I too would give up my neighbour to feed my children, even knowing what would happen to them. The fact that some Polish people participated in atrocities does not make them unique. Evil, after all, can be banal.

Like I said, I am a forgiving sort. I want to forgive. But has Poland asked for forgiveness? Have the guilty admitted to their active participation in the mass murder of their Jewish neighbours?

In 2000, a full 55 years after the war, the Polish-American historian Jan Gross published the book Neighbors about the destruction of a Polish Jewish community in 1941. Refuting the common Polish story that the occupying Germans were the sole perpetrators of this mass murder, the book states that some of the perpetrators were also ordinary Polish civilians. There was an outcry in Poland when the book was published, with many denying Polish involvement. Later forensic studies confirmed the book’s central claim of Polish complicity, though the exact number of victims remains debated.

But this fact had been well known among Jews for decades. I remember learning about it in my Jewish high school in Montreal in the late 80s, based on many survivor witness accounts. So, why did it take over half a century for Poland to admit their own wrongdoing and complicity? Why did the publication of this book cause so much controversy in Poland? Some of it was no doubt due to Poland being behind the Iron Curtain for so many years with strict limits on free speech and the sort of self-criticism that free speech allows.

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Poland is now trying to make amends, but there are consequences when a nation denies its own evil for too long. This evil can rise again and more quickly. On Good Friday of 2019, for example, some people in the town of Pruchnik dragged an effigy of a Jew through the streets before hanging it and setting it on fire. The last populist government of Poland, no longer in power, passed a law making it illegal to discuss Polish complicity in the war. Although the populist government backed down from the worst aspect of this law—it is no longer a jailable criminal offense, but a finable civil offense—it has still made life difficult for some. Professor Michał Bilewicz, for example, is a Jewish social psychologist who studies genocide and antisemitism, and he is widely praised for the quality of his scholarship. However, the Polish President has refused to sign off on granting him full professorship because of Bilewicz’s insistence that some Poles collaborated and were not exclusively victims. Bilewicz is still waiting for his well-deserved promotion to this day.

To be sure, Poland’s story doesn’t end there. Over the decades, there have been real efforts within Poland to confront this past. Initiatives like the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw or Kraków’s Galicia Jewish Museum have spearheaded public conversations about Polish-Jewish relations. Liberal newspapers like Gazeta Wyborcza actively promote reconciliation. Yet, these efforts coexist with deeply ingrained stereotypes and resistance to historical accountability among certain groups. And some of these stereotypes are promulgated by the Polish state: Polish textbooks given to school children, for example, continue to peddle in antisemitic tropes. Clearly, a lot more work is needed for real reconciliation to occur.

When I visited Krakow, I did not see any overt denial of history or any hostility. Everyone I met was charming and welcoming and kind. But some things felt off. While wandering Krakow’s old city, I noticed paintings of stereotypical Jews—usually men, often bearded and black-hatted, and always handling coins. When I asked an artist about the images, she said they were believed to bring good luck and financial fortune. I later learned this is a common Polish superstition, with sales of stereotypical Jewish figurines handling money a common feature in parts of Poland.

That evening, I dined at a Jewish restaurant in Krakow’s former Jewish quarter. The food was classic Ashkenazi and delicious, but the setting was not quite right; paintings of stereotypical Jews adorned the walls for example. Worse, I later realized that it was Yom Kippur eve—the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar when observant Jews fast for over 24 hours—so no authentic Jewish establishment, let alone restaurant would be open, making the experience feel like a performance of Jewishness.

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I had many interesting conversations in Poland and returned home with good memories. I’d like to return one day. Hopefully, this piece will not foreclose that possibility.

But forgiveness is only possible when people take responsibility, a lesson my Uncle Shlomo knew all too well. He kept that tattoo as a testament to his survival, a mark of what couldn’t be erased. Forgiveness requires honesty, a willingness to confront dark truths, even if they can’t be undone. While some liberal corners of Poland are making strides toward this reckoning, denial and defensiveness persist in other parts of the country. Perhaps one day, these efforts will coalesce, and I’ll find myself ready, at last, to forgive.

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Reflecting on this piece—which I wrote a few months ago—I’m reminded of the criticism Ta-Nehisi Coates received for The Message, his anti-Israel book accused of presenting a one-sided narrative without engaging dissenting views. Did I, like Coates, focus on what aligns with my discomfort while overlooking signs of progress or the nuances of modern Polish society? Was I too quick to see stereotypes while neglecting efforts at reconciliation and the diversity of Polish thought?

Perhaps my discomfort stems less from Poland itself and more from the lens I’ve brought with me. Had I sought out more contemporary voices or ventured beyond the tourist sites, maybe my impressions would have been different. I can’t help but wonder if I’m holding Poland to a higher standard because its relationship to my history feels more personal.

This post is me wrestling with all of this, and I now realize just how easy it is to tell a story that feels true enough but isn’t the whole truth.