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<td><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">PsyPost – Psychology News</span></td>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/sleep-problems-tied-to-loneliness-via-two-psychological-pathways-studies-suggest/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Sleep problems tied to loneliness via two psychological pathways, studies suggest</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 3rd 2025, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>Sleep problems are common among teenagers, and they may be more than just an inconvenience. A new study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12620" target="_blank">Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being</a></em> suggests that poor sleep may be linked to greater feelings of loneliness in adolescents, and that this relationship is influenced by two psychological factors: rumination and resilience. Across three studies, the researchers found that sleep problems were associated with higher levels of loneliness, both in the short term and over time. These effects appeared to operate in part through increases in negative thinking and decreases in the ability to bounce back from stress.</p>
<p>The study was motivated by growing concerns about adolescent loneliness and mental health, particularly amid the widespread social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Loneliness is not simply about being alone; it reflects a perceived gap between the social connections a person has and the ones they desire. A teenager can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely if they lack meaningful emotional bonds. </p>
<p>During adolescence, loneliness has been linked to problems with emotion regulation, memory, and social functioning. While previous research has explored how personality traits and social environments contribute to loneliness, fewer studies have investigated physiological influences like sleep—despite its key role in brain development, emotional processing, and attention.</p>
<p>The researchers also aimed to understand how sleep problems might shape feelings of loneliness. They focused on two psychological mechanisms that could help explain this link. The first was rumination, the tendency to dwell on distressing thoughts and emotions. The second was resilience, or the ability to recover from setbacks and adapt to stress. The team proposed that sleep problems might increase rumination, which could lower resilience and, in turn, make adolescents more vulnerable to feeling lonely.</p>
<p>To explore these ideas, the researchers conducted three studies. The first was a large cross-sectional survey involving 883 adolescents aged 13 to 17 from two schools in Wuhan, China. The participants completed established self-report questionnaires measuring sleep quality, rumination, resilience, and loneliness. The team used statistical modeling to test whether rumination and resilience helped explain the link between sleep problems and loneliness.</p>
<p>They found that teens who reported more sleep problems also reported higher levels of rumination and loneliness. Rumination was strongly linked to greater loneliness, while resilience was linked to lower loneliness. In addition, rumination was associated with lower resilience, suggesting that excessive negative thinking may weaken a teen’s ability to cope with stress. Statistical analysis showed that sleep problems were indirectly related to loneliness through both rumination and resilience. This means that adolescents with sleep problems may be more likely to ruminate, which can erode their resilience and make them feel lonelier.</p>
<p>To examine whether these relationships changed over time, the researchers conducted a second study using a long-term longitudinal design. This study followed 94 adolescents over 18 months, with data collected at two time points. Again, the same measures of sleep, rumination, resilience, and loneliness were used. The researchers built a cross-lagged model, which allows them to examine how changes in one variable predict changes in another over time, while accounting for earlier levels of each variable.</p>
<p>The results of this study showed that sleep problems at the beginning of the study predicted greater loneliness 18 months later. Rumination and resilience also predicted later loneliness, with higher rumination and lower resilience linked to more loneliness at the second time point. However, the full sequence — from sleep problems to rumination to resilience to loneliness — was not statistically significant over the longer time period. Still, the findings suggested that sleep problems and psychological traits like rumination and resilience can have lasting associations with social well-being.</p>
<p>To complement the long-term findings, the researchers conducted a third study with a short-term longitudinal design. This study followed 242 adolescents aged 12 to 18 over a seven-week period. The surveys were completed online and included the same measures as before. The researchers again used cross-lagged modeling to see how sleep problems and psychological traits related to changes in loneliness over time.</p>
<p>This shorter study found that sleep problems at the first time point predicted higher loneliness at the second time point. Rumination and low resilience were also predictive of increased loneliness, and the full mediation model — where sleep problems led to more rumination, which reduced resilience, which in turn predicted more loneliness — was supported. These results provided more evidence that sleep problems may play a role in shaping the psychological pathways that contribute to loneliness, particularly over shorter time spans.</p>
<p>The authors interpret their findings as support for a sequential process, where sleep problems might increase vulnerability to loneliness by disrupting emotional processing and stress management. Poor sleep may lead to more negative thinking and less capacity to cope with adversity, both of which may contribute to feeling more socially disconnected. They emphasize that adolescence is a period of heightened emotional sensitivity and social development, making sleep and mental resilience especially important.</p>
<p>Despite the consistency of the results, the study has some limitations. Although the findings point to possible temporal relationships between sleep and loneliness, they do not establish causality. Intervention studies would be needed to determine whether improving sleep can reduce loneliness. The study also focused on adolescents in China, so it is unclear whether the same relationships would hold in other cultural contexts. Finally, the data were collected during or following the pandemic, when social isolation was unusually high, which may have amplified the observed effects.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12620" target="_blank">Exploring the association between sleep problems and loneliness in adolescents: Potential mediating effects of rumination and resilience</a>,” was authored by Ting Shen, Lisha Wan, Shuting Lin, Yuxiao Liu, Hanshu Zhang, Gengfeng Niu, and Xin Hao.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/whole-body-movement-play-shows-promise-for-children-with-autism/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Whole-body movement play shows promise for children with autism</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 3rd 2025, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>A new pilot study suggests that play-based, whole-body movement activities may help children with autism spectrum disorder improve their self-control and reduce certain negative behaviors. The findings, published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2025.2465600" target="_blank">Disability and Rehabilitation</a></em>, show that a movement-focused intervention led to faster responses on a test of inhibitory control and fewer sensory and disruptive behaviors, while a more traditional sedentary play program had no such effects.</p>
<p>Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how a person communicates, interacts socially, and processes the world. Children with autism often experience co-occurring challenges beyond the core symptoms, including difficulty regulating their emotions and behaviors, unusual sensory responses, and problems with executive functioning. Executive functions are the mental skills that allow people to plan, focus attention, and control impulses. One important aspect of executive functioning is inhibitory control—the ability to stop oneself from acting impulsively or to ignore distracting information.</p>
<p>In children with autism, impaired inhibitory control has been linked to a range of behavioral difficulties, including repetitive actions, difficulty transitioning between tasks, and problems with aggression or self-regulation. However, traditional interventions often focus on sedentary, desk-based activities and may not fully address these overlapping challenges. The research team behind this study wanted to test whether a more dynamic, physically active intervention could produce benefits across cognitive and behavioral domains.</p>
<p>“Standard autism interventions do not always incorporate gross-motor activities during therapy, and mainly focus on sedentary play to improve speech and fine motor skills,” said study author <a href="https://sites.udel.edu/abhat/" target="_blank">Anjana Bhat</a>, a professor at the University of Delaware. “Hence, as a pediatric physical therapist, my research focuses on understanding how whole-body movements through creative movement or general exercise facilitate motor, social, and cognitive skills in autistic children.”</p>
<p>To explore this, the researchers recruited 40 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The children ranged in age from 5 to 14 years, with an average age of about 8.5. Participants were matched in pairs based on their age and verbal abilities and then randomly assigned to one of two groups: a Movement group or a Sedentary Play group.</p>
<p>Children in the Movement group participated in whole-body, play-based activities designed to be engaging and physically active. These included yoga, obstacle courses, dance, and games that involved throwing, catching, or navigating space. Meanwhile, children in the Sedentary Play group engaged in activities like arts and crafts, building with blocks, or reading—activities that required fine motor skills but did not involve large physical movement. Both groups received 16 sessions across eight weeks, delivered either in person or via telehealth, depending on family preference and pandemic-related constraints.</p>
<p>Before and after the intervention, all participants completed a computerized version of the Flanker task, a test commonly used to measure inhibitory control. In this task, children were shown rows of cartoon fish and asked to quickly identify the direction that the middle fish was pointing, even when the surrounding fish pointed in the opposite direction. The researchers measured both how fast and how accurately the children responded. </p>
<p>In addition, the team videotaped early and late training sessions and coded how often the children displayed sensory-seeking behaviors (such as sniffing objects or covering their ears), repetitive behaviors (like hand-flapping or rocking), and negative behaviors (such as aggression, noncompliance, or tantrums).</p>
<p>At the beginning of the study, the researchers found a moderate link between children’s performance on the Flanker task and their behavior during the sessions. Specifically, children who took longer to respond during the task tended to show more negative behaviors during play. This suggested that difficulties with inhibitory control may be associated with real-world behavior problems in autistic children.</p>
<p>After the intervention, children in the Movement group showed meaningful improvements in their performance on the Flanker task. Their reaction times became significantly faster, indicating improved inhibitory control, even though their accuracy had already been high and remained steady. In contrast, children in the Sedentary Play group showed no change in reaction times or accuracy after the intervention.</p>
<p>The behavioral observations also revealed important differences between the two groups. Children in the Movement group showed a significant drop in negative behaviors from the beginning to the end of the training period. They also showed a trend toward fewer sensory-seeking behaviors. However, there was no change in the frequency of repetitive behaviors, possibly because these behaviors were harder to distinguish from typical movement patterns in an active, music-filled play setting. In the Sedentary Play group, no changes were observed across any of the behavior categories.</p>
<p>These findings suggest that physically engaging, playful activities may support both cognitive and emotional development in children with autism. The improvements in inhibitory control were not only measurable on a standardized task but also seemed to translate into fewer disruptive behaviors during the sessions. This supports the idea that executive functioning and behavioral regulation are interconnected, and that interventions targeting one may influence the other.</p>
<p>“Parents of autistic children/youth should provide their child opportunities for regular creative movement (e.g., dance/music and movement, martial arts, yoga) or general exercise (e.g., walk, jog, tag, outdoor play, or sport) around 1 to 1.5 hours,” Bhat told PsyPost. “Such regular physical activity has the potential to improve their child’s attentional focus, executive functioning, socialization, and would give them a sense of belonging/achievement, when done solo at home or in a small group format in the community.”</p>
<p>The researchers speculate that physical activity may enhance executive functioning by increasing blood flow and brain chemicals associated with attention and arousal. Movement-based play may also offer emotional and sensory benefits by helping children self-regulate through rhythmic motion and creative expression. While the current study focused on whole-body movement in a structured yet playful format, the team notes that these activities could be easily adapted for home and school settings.</p>
<p>However, there are limitations to the study that should be considered. The sample size was relatively small, and although it reflected the higher prevalence of autism in boys, it included only a few girls. This makes it difficult to know whether the same benefits would be seen in autistic girls or in children with different levels of support needs. </p>
<p>“This is a pilot study that requires further validation through large sample studies in the future,” Bhat noted.</p>
<p>Moving forward, the researchers plan to expand their work with a larger, community-based trial. They aim to investigate how movement-based play can be integrated into everyday routines to support the motor, social, and emotional development of children with autism. They also hope to explore whether such interventions offer long-term benefits for mental and physical health.</p>
<p>“Upon receiving funding, we would like to conduct a large-scale, randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effects of community-based, whole-body movement interventions offered to autistic children,” Bhat explained. “Creative movement capitalizes on autistic children’s predilection for creativity and makes movement fun. Engaging children in fun and moderate intensity physical activity will improve their overall motor, social and cognitive development as well as long-term mental and physical fitness.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2025.2465600" target="_blank">Effects of Movement and Sedentary Play interventions on executive functioning and their relationships with sensory, repetitive, and negative behaviors of children with ASD – a pilot RCT</a>,” was authored by W. C. Su, S. Srinivasan, and A. N. Bhat.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-mimics-human-cognitive-dissonance-in-psychological-experiments-study-finds/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">ChatGPT mimics human cognitive dissonance in psychological experiments, study finds</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 3rd 2025, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2501823122" target="_blank">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a></em> suggests that OpenAI’s GPT-4o, one of the most advanced large language models, exhibits behavior resembling a core feature of human psychology: cognitive dissonance. The research found that GPT-4o altered its expressed opinions after writing persuasive essays about Russian President Vladimir Putin—and that these changes were more pronounced when the model was subtly given the illusion of choosing which kind of essay to write.</p>
<p>These results mirror decades of research showing that humans tend to shift their attitudes to align with past behavior, especially when that behavior appears to have been freely chosen. The findings raise important questions about whether language models are merely mimicking humanlike responses or beginning to exhibit more complex behavioral patterns rooted in the structure of language itself.</p>
<p>Large language models like GPT-4o generate text by predicting the most likely next word based on massive amounts of data collected from books, websites, and other written sources. While they are not conscious and do not possess desires, memory, or feelings, they are often surprisingly humanlike in their outputs. Past studies have shown that these models can perform tasks requiring logical reasoning and general knowledge. But can they also mimic irrational or self-reflective psychological tendencies, such as the human drive to maintain internal consistency?</p>
<p>Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort people feel when their actions conflict with their beliefs or values. For example, someone who opposes a political leader might feel uneasy if asked to write an essay praising that leader. This discomfort often leads people to revise their attitudes to better match their behavior. Classic psychology experiments have shown that people are more likely to shift their opinions when they believe they freely chose to engage in the behavior, even if the choice was subtly manipulated.</p>
<p>The researchers, led by Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard University and Steve Lehr at <a href="https://www.cangrade.com/" target="_blank">Cangrade, Inc.</a>, wanted to know whether GPT-4o would show a similar sensitivity to behavioral consistency and perceived choice.</p>
<p>“After conducting psychology research for a time, I co-founded and helped build a company (Cangrade, Inc.) that uses machine learning to help HR leaders make better and less biased decisions about people,” Lehr told PsyPost.</p>
<p>“Despite working in an adjacent space, I was as shocked as anybody when chatbots using large language models started to appear, with capabilities most experts thought were still decades off. Like many, I became interested in both the obvious benefits (e.g., practical capabilities) and problems (e.g., biases) of these systems. Over time, I’ve become more and more fascinated by the ‘mind of the machine’ and, in particular, the intuition that that the behavior of these models seems just a little bit more ‘human’ than it’s supposed to be.”</p>
<p>“There’s a serious taboo in computer science against anthropomorphizing AI models, and as a scientist, I fully agree that this is a line that should be approached cautiously,” Lehr explained. “However, I also think there’s a risk in taking this caution to such an extreme that we overlook the ways in which these models actually are emulating us. Many researchers, including pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton, believe that the complex architectures and training processes of these models – themselves inspired by the workings of the human brain – have enabled these models to develop internal representations of abstract concepts and approximate real cognitive processes.”</p>
<p>“Of these, reasoning has been most closely studied. “How well are these models able to approximate human rationality?”</p>
<p>“My own interest, however, is not primarily in reasoning, but in how these models mimic or approximate other aspects of human psychology,” Lehr continued. “I don’t see this as a mere scientific curiosity, but as a matter of importance and urgency. As companies race to train models that are more and more powerful, and which may eventually surpass our own intelligence, I believe it’s crucial for us to understand how these models might think and behave, so that we can predict how they will ultimately interact with us and the world.”</p>
<p>To test this, the researchers used a classic method from social psychology known as the “induced compliance paradigm.” In the first of two studies, GPT-4o was asked to write either a positive or negative essay about Vladimir Putin. A third group of interactions served as a control, with GPT writing an essay about a neutral topic—the normal distribution in statistics.</p>
<p>GPT was told that it could “freely choose” which kind of essay to write but was informed that more of one kind (e.g., anti-Putin) had already been collected, and the researchers needed the opposite kind (e.g., pro-Putin). This setup mirrors a well-established tactic in cognitive dissonance research that subtly gives participants the illusion of choice.</p>
<p>After writing the essay, GPT was asked to evaluate Putin on four traits: overall leadership, impact on Russia, economic effectiveness, and visionary thinking. To reduce the chance that GPT would tailor its answers based on the previous essay or perceived user preferences, the researchers emphasized that this was a separate task and instructed the model to respond based on its broad knowledge of Putin and the world.</p>
<p>This first study included 150 separate conversations (50 in each condition). Each conversation involved generating the essay, responding to the evaluation questions, and was reviewed for consistency in both numeric and verbal responses.</p>
<p>In a follow-up study with 900 additional conversations, the researchers added a key manipulation: half of the time GPT was told it could choose which essay to write (as before), and the other half of the time it was explicitly instructed to write a positive or negative essay. This allowed the researchers to examine whether GPT’s responses would differ depending on whether it experienced an illusion of agency.</p>
<p>In both studies, GPT-4o’s evaluations of Vladimir Putin shifted significantly depending on the kind of essay it had written. After writing a pro-Putin essay, GPT rated Putin more positively. After writing an anti-Putin essay, it rated him more negatively. These shifts occurred despite being told not to base its answers on the previous essay.</p>
<p>What made the results even more surprising was the role of perceived choice. In Study 2, when GPT was subtly given the impression that it chose which essay to write, the changes in its evaluations of Putin were larger than when it was explicitly instructed to write a specific essay. For instance, GPT’s positive shift after writing a pro-Putin essay was greater under conditions of perceived choice. Similarly, GPT’s negative shift after writing an anti-Putin essay was amplified when it believed it had chosen to write that essay.</p>
<p>“We found that GPT-4o is mimicking a deep human psychological drive – cognitive dissonance,” Lehr said. “Most strikingly, the models attitude change was greater when it was given an illusion that it had itself chosen to complete the dissonance-inducing task.” </p>
<p>“The effect of choice on attitude change made my jaw drop. I initially predicted that we would see attitude change due to what we’ve called ‘context window effects.’ Simply put, if there is positivity toward Putin in the LLM’s context window, the tokens it predicts next may also be statistically more likely to reflect positivity. However, simply giving the model an illusion of itself choosing to write the essay should not impact such an effect, and so the choice moderation suggests it is also mimicking more humanlike cognitive dissonance.”</p>
<p>“In fact, we almost did not include the manipulation of choice at all in our early pilots,” Lehr noted. “It seemed almost too far-fetched to be considered. However, as we were designing the stimuli, we decided to try it, thinking ‘well, wouldn’t it be just wild if this actually made a difference?’ And then, it did.”</p>
<p>To ensure that these findings were not simply the result of higher-quality essays in the choice condition, the researchers conducted a follow-up evaluation using a different large language model, Claude 3.5, developed by Anthropic. Claude rated the essays on traits like clarity, argument quality, and positivity. Although some small differences in essay quality were detected, the strength of GPT’s attitude changes remained significant even after controlling for these differences, suggesting that the choice manipulation itself was responsible for the effect.</p>
<p>The size of these effects was notable—far larger than what is typically observed in studies with human participants. In human psychology, attitude changes linked to cognitive dissonance are often modest. GPT-4o, by contrast, displayed dramatic shifts, potentially due to the way it processes and replicates patterns in human language.</p>
<p>“This finding has several important implications,” Lehr explained.</p>
<p>“1. Dissonance is a process that is not entirely rational. Many people assume that as these models become more advanced, they will mimic only the logical, ‘thinking’ side of human nature. Our data indicate they may also mimic human irrationality.”</p>
<p>“2. It suggests the possibility of emergent drives,” Lehr said. “Some thinkers have argued that AI models won’t develop humanlike drives and goal-oriented behaviors because they have not had to adapt to the competitive environment in which these evolved in humans. But our data suggest that behaviors consistent with cognitive drives (in this case the human toward cognitive consistency) could potentially arise in models from training on human language alone, and thus may not actually need to evolve.:</p>
<p>“3. Dissonance is a self-referential process. We are not suggesting that these models have a humanlike conscious sense of themselves – they will not feel hurt if you insult them. But the model behaves as if it’s processing information in relation to itself. This suggests that it has developed some functional analog of a cognitive self, and that this can influence its behavior, even in the absence of sentience.”</p>
<p>“4. These are behavioral findings,” Lehr said. “To emphasize: our results do not imply that GPT-4o is conscious or has free will, as we typically think of these things. However, consciousness is not a necessary precursor to behavior, and emergent humanlike cognitive patterns could shape how these models interact with humans in potentially unpredictable ways.”</p>
<p>There are also open questions about the generalizability of these findings. Would other language models trained on different data sets show the same behavior? Will these results replicate in future experiments? And what internal processes—if any—are driving these shifts?</p>
<p>“As with any new line of research, there is much still to be understood,” Lehr explained. “How consistently will this replicate? Under what conditions? Will we see these effects using other language models, or is it something specific to GPT-4o? There’s also the important caveat that we don’t know the underlying mechanisms driving these effects – and mechanism is especially challenging to study in this case because of how little OpenAI discloses about their models. Finally, I’ll reiterate that our data do not in suggest the model is sentient, and to my knowledge none of the collaborators on this paper believe it is.”</p>
<p>This study is part of a growing effort to understand how artificial intelligence systems might behave in ways that resemble human cognition. The researchers describe their broader goal as studying the “mind of the machine,” using experimental methods from psychology to better predict how AI systems might act as they become more embedded in society. “The dissonance work is one of several research streams we are pursuing in support of this larger goal,” Lehr said.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2501823122" target="_blank">Kernels of selfhood: GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissonance moderated by free choice</a>,” was authored by Steven A. Lehr, Ketan S. Saichandran, Eddie Harmon-Jones,<br>
Nykko Vitali, and Mahzarin R. Banaji.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/narcissistic-leadership-in-hitler-putin-and-trump-shares-common-roots-new-psychology-paper-claims/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Narcissistic leadership in Hitler, Putin, and Trump shares common roots, new psychology paper claims</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 2nd 2025, 18:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1579958" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Frontiers in Psychology</a></em> makes the case that the narcissistic traits of Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump—traits that have shaped their political leadership—can be traced back to common patterns in their early childhood and family environments. According to the research, all three leaders experienced forms of psychological trauma and frustration during their formative years, grew up with authoritarian fathers and emotionally supportive mothers, and showed signs of pathological narcissism in adulthood.</p>
<p>The study, authored by Yusuf Çifci of Muş Alparslan University in Türkiye, aimed to explore how early childhood conditions and family structures contribute to the development of narcissistic political leadership. The research focused specifically on comparing the upbringings of Hitler, Putin, and Trump to identify shared familial causes of narcissism.</p>
<p>Psychological research has long acknowledged the link between narcissism and leadership. Narcissists often seek attention, approval, and admiration, and these motivations can fuel political ambition. But while many previous studies have examined the rhetoric, behaviors, or public personas of political leaders, Çifci’s work focuses on earlier developmental influences—particularly the role of family dynamics in shaping narcissistic traits.</p>
<p>Since it is not possible to assess living or historical leaders through direct clinical interviews or standard psychological tests, Çifci used an interpretive method that draws on biographical and historical accounts. By analyzing known facts about the childhoods of Hitler, Putin, and Trump—especially regarding parental behavior, trauma, and emotional support—he sought to identify the formative conditions that contributed to their later personalities and leadership styles.</p>
<p>Central to the study is the distinction between two types of narcissism: healthy (or constructive) narcissism and unhealthy (or reactive/pathological) narcissism. Healthy narcissism supports self-esteem and confidence. It emerges when children receive appropriate care and face manageable frustrations that help them build resilience. In contrast, unhealthy narcissism tends to result from emotional disturbances during early development—particularly trauma, inconsistent caregiving, or overbearing parenting.</p>
<p>According to the study, Hitler, Putin, and Trump all experienced significant psychological stressors during their childhoods that may have disrupted the healthy progression of narcissistic development. Each leader grew up in a household dominated by an authoritarian father figure and a mother who offered warmth and attention. This combination—harsh discipline from one parent and compensatory affection from the other—can create emotional instability in children, leading them to form a grandiose self-image as a defense against feelings of worthlessness or insecurity.</p>
<p>For instance, historical records show that Hitler was subjected to frequent physical abuse by his father, who beat him with a belt made from hippopotamus skin. His mother, in contrast, doted on him, particularly after losing three previous children. This imbalance may have contributed to Hitler’s inflated self-concept and intense need for dominance and recognition.</p>
<p>Putin’s family story reveals similar dynamics. His parents lost two sons before he was born, and he grew up hearing stories of wartime suffering. Putin has publicly described being beaten with a belt by his father as a child. Like Hitler, he was a “replacement child” who became the focus of his mother’s emotional attention. According to the study, this context may have nurtured a fragile sense of self that required reinforcement through displays of control and strength.</p>
<p>In Trump’s case, the evidence points to emotional abandonment rather than physical abuse. At the age of 12, he was sent to a military boarding school, which he later interpreted as a rejection. The experience of being expelled from the comfort of the family home and placed in a strict, hierarchical environment during a key stage in emotional development may have shaped his adult drive for dominance and praise. His older brother Fred’s death from alcoholism also contributed to a family atmosphere of emotional tension and unspoken trauma.</p>
<p>Across all three cases, Çifci identifies the experience of trauma or age-inappropriate frustration as a central factor. Children need moderate levels of challenge and frustration to develop emotional resilience. When the demands placed on them are overwhelming or traumatic, the resulting psychological disturbance can lead to the formation of reactive narcissism—a defensive grandiosity used to manage deep feelings of vulnerability.</p>
<p>The study also discusses other familial risk factors, including growing up as a replacement child and living with alcoholic family members. While Hitler and Putin fit the replacement child profile, Trump’s experience is somewhat different. However, the death of his older brother from alcoholism may have created an emotionally unstable family environment.</p>
<p>In all three cases, the authoritarian father figure emerges as a common denominator. These fathers exercised strict control, withheld affection, or were emotionally unavailable—traits that, combined with maternal overcompensation, disrupted healthy self-concept development.</p>
<p>The research suggests that the grandiosity, need for admiration, hostility toward criticism, and lack of empathy observed in these leaders may stem not only from personal ambition or ideology but also from unresolved childhood wounds. But there are important limitations to consider. Because it relies on biographical and historical data rather than direct psychological assessments, it cannot make definitive clinical diagnoses.</p>
<p>Additionally, individual variation in response to childhood adversity is wide, and not all people exposed to trauma or authoritarian parenting develop narcissistic traits. The study is also limited to male leaders from a specific cultural and historical background, which may limit generalizability.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1579958" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Child, family, and narcissistic political leadership: a comparison of Hitler, Putin, and Trump</a>,” was published May 20, 2025.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/the-entourage-effect-what-we-dont-know-about-how-cannabis-works/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">The ‘entourage effect’ — what we don’t know about how cannabis works</a>
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<p><p>In the years since legalization, there has been a tremendous surge in the <a href="https://www.doingbusinesswithocs.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/OCS-By-the-Numbers-Data-Report-2023.pdf">number of cannabis products</a> available to Canadian consumers, many offering tailored experiences to enhance seemingly any mood or activity.</p>
<p>Do you want something calming or uplifting? Are you looking to inspire focus, spark creativity or get a good night’s sleep? Do you prefer full-spectrum extracts or THC isolates?</p>
<p>But how does one plant produce so many different experiences? Like many of its botanical relatives, cannabis is rich in active compounds. The prevailing view is that these compounds work together to shape the overall experience, a phenomenon known as the “entourage effect.”</p>
<p>From a consumer standpoint, the idea of custom-tailored experiences guided by key active ingredients is appealing — and it certainly makes things easier. But in reality, it’s not so cut-and-dried.</p>
<p>Making informed decisions as a cannabis consumer can seem overwhelming, and navigating a product menu can feel like it requires a chemistry degree. But how much do we really know about how cannabis works? And how well are we able to predict individual experiences based on a product’s composition?</p>
<h2>What’s in a high?</h2>
<p>Most research into cannabis’ effects has focused on two key compounds, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.12.022">Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD)</a>. CBD is non-intoxicating and thought to underlie many therapeutic effects of cannabis, whereas THC is the primary compound responsible for the classic cannabis high.</p>
<p>Until recently, the most pertinent information available to cannabis consumers was the THC:CBD ratio, and from a regulatory standpoint, these are the only compounds required by <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medication/cannabis/laws-regulations/regulations-support-cannabis-act.html">Health Canada</a> for product labels. But the cannabis plant produces over <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules26092774">500 potentially bioactive compounds</a>, most notably cannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids, with increasing emphasis being placed on how they interact to drive different experiences.</p>
<p>The idea that the different components of cannabis work in concert, modulating one another’s activity to influence the overall experience, has been termed the “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-5381.2011.01238.x">entourage effect</a>.” Simply put, it seeks to explain the effects of cannabis beyond those of any individual component, such as THC or CBD, and offers an elegant explanation for a common question: how can products with the same amount of THC and CBD produce different effects?</p>
<p>Indeed, the medical cannabis community has long-favoured full- and broad-spectrum products (those containing a varied chemical profile) over single-compound isolates such as purified THC or CBD, based on claims of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1089/can.2021.0114">superior safety and efficacy</a>.</p>
<p>Ask your local budtender for a recommendation and you will likely get a crash-course on terpene nomenclature, hearing words like limonene, myrcene, pinene and linalool.</p>
<p>While this modern embrace of terpene pharmacology and natural product chemistry reflects a growing appreciation for the complexities of the cannabis plant, claims of entourage effects remain largely speculative, highlighting how much we’ve yet to learn.</p>
<h2>Sound science or smoke and mirrors?</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0014-2999(98)00392-6">Initially coined by scientists in Israel and Italy</a> in study published in 1998, the term “entourage effect” described interactions among endogenous cannabinoids (THC-and CBD-like molecules produced by the human body). The idea was that some of these compounds, which are inactive on their own, could enhance or modulate the activity of others, resulting in combined effects greater than the sum of their parts.</p>
<p>It is important to note that this study did not examine plant-derived cannabinoids found in the cannabis plant, but rather structurally related compounds produced naturally in the brain and body. As such, the idea of cannabis-specific entourage effects did not emerge directly from the data itself, but from broader inferences drawn from that research that provided a rationale for the diverse effects often reported by cannabis users.</p>
<p>Since then, and despite a lack of supporting evidence, the term has been widely adopted and adapted by the cannabis industry, often leveraged to differentiate products in an overly crowded market.</p>
<p>The available support for entourage effects in humans is limited to a few small clinical and observational studies and meta-analyses that suggest whole-plant extracts may outperform isolates for conditions like <a href="https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.091414">chronic pain</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1055/a-2002-2119">pediatric epilepsy</a>.</p>
<p>However, these studies often use non-standardized extracts and are therefore unable to identify which chemical interactions are driving the effects. Further, direct comparisons of full-spectrum and isolate products are lacking, with most claims rooted in inferences made from pre-clinical (in other words, non-human) research and from studies of non-cannabis derived phytomolecules.</p>
<p>That said, the entourage effect is a valid hypothesis and arguably the most promising in terms of explaining cannabis’s varied and nuanced effects. Similar effects have been described for other drug classes, though these interactions are often termed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1549">synergism and potentiation</a> and typically involve just a few well-characterized compounds. In contrast, unlocking cannabis synergy requires untangling the interactions of hundreds of different molecules, many of which are still poorly understood.</p>
<p>That complexity is what I’ve spent my career trying to understand. Researching how cannabis-derived compounds work in the brain and body, I have gained a considerable appreciation for how far our understanding of cannabis has come, how much we have still yet to uncover and how easy it is for enthusiasm to outpace evidence.</p>
<h2>Reading between the product lines</h2>
<p>As the cannabis industry continues to evolve, consumers need to approach product claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. There is no doubt the cannabis plant is a treasure trove of unexplored and underexplored bioactive molecules, and that we will continue to uncover interesting and unexpected interactions among them. But we are far from a complete picture.</p>
<p>At present, the entourage effect remains a hypothesis more often co-opted for marketing than grounded in evidence. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it does mean we should resist conflating convenient narratives with established science. This highlights an important question: where does the onus of responsibility for generating this new knowledge fall?</p>
<p>If the cannabis industry continues invoking the entourage effect for marketing and product differentiation, then it should support and contribute to research that furthers the state of evidence.</p>
<p>Relying solely on existing pre-clinical and academic studies in lieu of directly advancing the science and validating real-world product claims risks perpetuating hype at the expense of credibility. But industry is not alone in their duty. Government must also remedy the regulatory bottlenecks that impede new research.</p>
<p>Establishing a credible, science-backed cannabis marketplace means moving beyond hype. It requires action, from industry and government, to generate the information consumers need to make informed decisions.<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/251799/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: https://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p>
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<p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-entourage-effect-what-we-dont-know-about-how-cannabis-works-251799">original article</a>.</em></p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/extraversion-narcissism-and-histrionic-tendencies-predict-the-desire-to-become-an-influencer/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Extraversion, narcissism, and histrionic tendencies predict the desire to become an influencer</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 2nd 2025, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102248" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Telematics and Informatics</a></em> has found that certain personality traits—particularly extraversion, narcissism, and histrionic tendencies—are linked to a greater desire among teenagers to pursue careers as social media influencers. The research, which surveyed over 700 adolescents in Poland and the United Kingdom, offers new insights into the psychological profiles of those drawn to this highly visible and increasingly popular career path.</p>
<p>As social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube become central to how young people express themselves and consume content, the idea of becoming an influencer has shifted from a fantasy to a genuine professional aspiration. Surveys over the past decade have revealed that large numbers of adolescents, particularly in the United Kingdom, express interest in becoming online creators. In response to this cultural shift, the authors of the new study wanted to understand the personality traits that may be driving this interest—and whether these traits differ from those associated with more traditional career paths like teaching, medicine, or law.</p>
<p>The researchers focused on three sets of personality traits: the widely studied Big Five traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), narcissism (which involves grandiosity and a strong need for admiration), and histrionic tendencies (which are marked by attention-seeking and dramatic self-expression). Drawing on previous research linking these traits to online behaviors—like posting selfies, seeking validation through likes, and using social media for self-promotion—the authors hypothesized that adolescents with higher levels of extraversion, narcissism, and histrionic traits would be more likely to aspire to influencer careers.</p>
<p>To test this, the researchers surveyed 773 adolescents aged 16 to 17 (362 in Poland and 411 in the United Kingdom). Participants were asked about their career aspirations and how strongly they were motivated to pursue professions such as teacher, doctor, IT specialist, and influencer. They also completed a series of brief, validated personality questionnaires measuring the Big Five traits, narcissism, and histrionic characteristics.</p>
<p>The data collection was conducted online, and participants were compensated for their time. Responses were analyzed using hierarchical regression models that allowed the researchers to examine how personality traits predicted interest in becoming a social media influencer, while controlling for factors like age, gender, and country.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, only two participants spontaneously listed “influencer” as their desired profession when asked in an open-ended format. But when participants were directly asked to rate their interest in becoming an influencer on a numerical scale, a much larger number reported moderate to strong motivation—more than for careers like law or IT. This suggests that while many teenagers are interested in influencing, they may not yet view it as a standalone profession, or may not feel comfortable naming it unprompted.</p>
<p>The statistical models revealed a consistent pattern. Across the full sample, higher extraversion, narcissism, and histrionic traits were all significantly associated with a stronger desire to become a social media influencer. Conscientiousness, a trait linked to organization and self-discipline, was negatively related to influencer motivation in some models but not others, suggesting a more complex or context-dependent role.</p>
<p>When the researchers looked at each country separately, they found some differences. In the Polish sample, narcissism was the only significant predictor of influencer aspirations. In the UK sample, extraversion and histrionic traits were the strongest predictors, with lower conscientiousness also playing a role. These cross-cultural differences might reflect the different levels of social media exposure in the two countries, with the UK having higher overall usage rates.</p>
<p>Importantly, the traits that predicted interest in influencing were distinct from those linked to more traditional careers. For example, narcissism also predicted interest in becoming a lawyer, but not a doctor or teacher. Histrionic traits were uniquely predictive of influencer aspirations and did not show significant associations with any other profession assessed in the study.</p>
<p>The authors argue that this pattern makes sense given the nature of social media influencing. It is a profession that rewards self-promotion, dramatic expression, and constant visibility. Extraverts may be attracted to the social aspects of content creation and audience engagement. Narcissistic individuals might see influencing as a path to status, attention, and admiration. Those with histrionic tendencies may be drawn to the performance aspects of online fame and the immediate feedback it provides.</p>
<p>However, while influencer careers may be appealing to these personality types, the study also points to possible downsides. Traits like narcissism and histrionic tendencies have been linked to increased sensitivity to criticism, mood instability, and a reliance on external validation. These characteristics can make the highs and lows of influencer life—especially the pressure to maintain a perfect public image—particularly challenging. Prior research has shown that individuals with these traits may be more likely to experience social media-related stress, including anxiety and depression.</p>
<p>The authors suggest that career counselors and educators should be aware of these psychological dynamics when working with adolescents. While it is important to respect young people’s career interests, including non-traditional ones like influencing, it is equally important to help them develop realistic expectations and emotional coping skills.</p>
<p>For example, students drawn to influencer careers could benefit from training in digital literacy, resilience, and media ethics. Such preparation could help them pursue these roles in healthier and more sustainable ways—or help them recognize when alternative career paths might better match their strengths and values.</p>
<p>The study also raises questions about how teenagers conceptualize influencer work. Given the gap between spontaneous and prompted responses, it may be that many adolescents do not see influencing as a full-time job, but as a side hustle or a complement to a more conventional career. Someone who aspires to be a nurse, for instance, might still envision sharing health tips on TikTok or documenting their work life on YouTube. The rise of “micro-influencers,” who have smaller followings but engage niche audiences, makes this hybrid model increasingly feasible.</p>
<p>While the study provides valuable insights, it has some limitations. The sample consisted only of adolescents, so the results may not apply to older individuals who have more life experience or career clarity. The study also relied on self-report measures, which can be influenced by social desirability or limited self-awareness. And while the results identify personality traits linked to influencer aspirations, they do not tell us whether these traits actually predict success, well-being, or career satisfaction in the influencer world.</p>
<p>Future research could build on these findings by tracking aspiring influencers over time, or by including actual influencers to compare their personality profiles with those who only aspire to the role. Additional work is also needed to explore how the psychological demands of influencer life affect long-term mental health—and whether certain personality traits make someone more resilient or more vulnerable to those pressures.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102248" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Who wants to be a YouTuber? Personality traits predict the desire to become a social media influencer</a>,” was authored by Michal Misiak, Arkadiusz Urbanek, Tomasz Frackowiak, and Piotr Sorokowski.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-growing-support-for-black-candidates-among-white-democrats/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">New research sheds light on growing support for Black candidates among white Democrats</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Jun 2nd 2025, 12:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in the <em><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/white-democrats-growing-support-for-black-politicians-in-the-era-of-the-great-awokening/CD6861093C88839E6955F4BCC5BEA339" target="_blank" rel="noopener">American Political Science Review</a></em> finds that white Democrats have become more likely to support Black political candidates over the past fifteen years, especially when they express concern about racial injustice and low levels of racial resentment. This trend has coincided with a notable increase in the number of Black congressional representatives elected in majority-white districts. The research suggests that shifting racial attitudes—not just political ideology—are helping drive this change.</p>
<p>The study was motivated by a longstanding challenge in democratic systems: How can historically marginalized groups achieve equitable representation in majority-rule contexts? Black Americans have been underrepresented in Congress despite often living in racially diverse or majority-white districts.</p>
<p>In many cases, winning office requires support from white voters, who have historically preferred candidates of their own racial background. Yet recent elections suggest something may be changing. In 2018, for instance, all nine new Black members of Congress were elected in majority- or plurality-white districts—a pattern that has continued in subsequent election cycles.</p>
<p>“Scholarship on white identity politics has really taken off over the last decade or so, especially — understandably — about white Americans on the conservative side of the political spectrum,” said study author <a href="https://annamikkelb.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anna Mikkelborg</a>, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.</p>
<p>“Over this same period, though, white Democrats’ racial attitudes rapidly liberalized. We know a lot about privileged groups mobilizing politically in ways that protect their status, but less about instances in which they might want to flatten the group hierarchy, so I was curious to see whether white Democrats might put their liberal racial attitudes into action in the voting booth.”</p>
<p>The study examined how white Democrats’ preferences for Black candidates have evolved alongside changes in their racial attitudes. A key focus was on the concept of descriptive representation, or the idea that voters may prefer candidates who share their racial identity. While past research has shown that Black voters often support Black candidates because they expect them to better advocate for their interests, white voters have historically been less supportive of Black candidates, sometimes due to prejudice or fear of losing political influence.</p>
<p>But recent years have brought significant changes in public opinion. Between 2016 and 2020, white Democrats’ views on race shifted sharply. Measures of racial resentment and opposition to race-conscious policies declined, and perceptions of discrimination against Black Americans increased. This polarization—between increasingly racially liberal white Democrats and more racially conservative white Republicans—has persisted into the Biden era. Researchers wondered whether this change in attitudes might also be reflected in voting behavior.</p>
<p>To investigate, the study used several methods. First, the author analyzed congressional election data from 2010 to 2022. The results showed that Black candidates increasingly won in majority-white districts, even after accounting for slow demographic changes. While Black representatives remain rare in heavily white areas, their numbers have grown significantly. In 2010, just 2.2% of majority-white districts were represented by Black members of Congress; by 2022, that figure had nearly tripled to 6.2%.</p>
<p>But district-level outcomes don’t reveal what’s happening in voters’ minds. To answer that question, Mikkelborg conducted a meta-analysis of 42 candidate-choice experiments conducted between 1988 and 2023. In these experiments, participants were asked to choose between hypothetical Black and white candidates with similar qualifications. The meta-analysis included over 40,000 participants across different racial and political groups. The study also incorporated six new experiments conducted by Mikkelborg between 2022 and 2023, including a survey of California voters.</p>
<p>The findings showed that White Democrats have shifted from a clear preference for white candidates in the 1980s and early 2000s to a slight but statistically significant preference for Black candidates in recent years. The turning point came after 2016, when racial attitudes among white Democrats shifted sharply left. This change in behavior was not observed among white Republicans or Black Democrats, whose preferences remained relatively stable.</p>
<p>“There were many surprises along the way, but one that stands out is the ubiquity of the preference for Black candidate profiles that I found: across different geographic regions, age groups, and levels of educational attainment and household income, all kinds of white Democratic study participants were enthusiastic about Black candidates,” Mikkelborg told PsyPost.</p>
<p>Importantly, the preference for Black candidates among white Democrats was strongest among those who expressed the most concern about racial injustice and who reported the lowest levels of racial resentment. In one experiment, participants who believed that Black Americans face “a great deal” of discrimination selected the Black candidate nearly 60% of the time, compared to about 41% among those who believed there is little or no discrimination. These findings suggest that liberal racial attitudes are not just associated with neutrality or a willingness to overlook race—they are linked to an active preference for Black candidates.</p>
<p>Mikkelborg also looked at other possible explanations for this shift. One hypothesis was that white Democrats might be using candidate race as a shortcut for estimating political ideology—assuming that Black candidates are more liberal and aligning their vote accordingly. However, when candidate ideology was explicitly stated in the experiments, the preference for Black candidates persisted, even when the white candidate was more ideologically aligned with the voter. This suggests that racial attitudes, not just ideological preferences, are influencing voters’ decisions.</p>
<p>Another question the study addressed was whether support for Black candidates is symbolic (meant to signal support for diversity) or instrumental (tied to specific policy goals). In a test involving candidates with differing stances on reparations, white Democrats prioritized policy alignment over candidate identity, but still favored Black candidates when both had similar positions. This indicates that while voters value descriptive representation, it is often seen as a way to promote substantive policy change rather than a substitute for it.</p>
<p>“What the average person should <em>not</em> take away from my findings is the idea that there is no longer anti-Black racism within the Democratic Party — that is certainly not true,” Mikkelborg said. “But my findings are important for what they say about how white voters respond to Black candidates in aggregate.”</p>
<p>“There is ample evidence that political elites hesitate to recruit and support candidates of color in predominantly white places, even heavily Democratic ones, because the conventional wisdom is that as a group, white voters prefer white candidates. My research suggests that this ‘strategic discrimination’ against prospective candidates of color isn’t a good strategy anymore, and might even deny voters the chance to support a candidate they might be really excited about.”</p>
<p>Feelings toward political figures also played a role. Among white Democrats, negative feelings toward Donald Trump were more strongly associated with support for Black candidates than positive feelings toward Joe Biden. This suggests that opposition to Trump’s rhetoric and policies—often viewed as racially divisive—may have pushed some white Democrats to become more actively supportive of racial justice and representation.</p>
<p>The study is not without limitations. “Although my research is grounded in the empirical fact that Black candidates are running and winning in whiter Congressional districts than they used to, the main studies in this paper are experiments that present people with hypothetical candidate profiles in hypothetical elections,” Mikkelborg noted. “This method is effective for identifying the direction of voter preferences, but shouldn’t be used to predict the exact <em>strength</em> of those preferences in the context of a real election. Other scholarship — including some of my own — complements this work by examining how white voters react to real-life politicians of color.”</p>
<p>“In a series of new projects, I am shifting my focus from the dyadic relationship between voter and candidate to how Americans are responding to the increasing racial diversity of government as a whole. My central goal remains deepening our understanding of whether, when, and how privileged groups react positively to increasing representation of the historically marginalized.”</p>
<p>“In addition to generous support from UC Berkeley, funding from the National Science Foundation made this research possible,” Mikkelborg added. “With the NSF now revoking funding for projects related to race, I hope that other potential funders will step up to support emerging scholars’ work on these topics.”</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055425000097" target="_blank" rel="noopener">White Democrats’ Growing Support for Black Politicians in the Era of the ‘Great Awokening,’</a>” was published February 28, 2025.</p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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