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Introduction
Cory does research in Social Cognition, Political Psychology, Moral Psychology, and Metascience. She is currently the Executive Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project and a Visiting Faculty Scholar in the Management and Psychology Departments at University of Pennsylvania.
Personal website: www.coryjclark.com
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - June 2020
September 2006 - June 2008
August 2008 - June 2014
Education
August 2008 - June 2014
Field of study
- Social and Personality Psychology; Quantitative Methods
September 2005 - June 2008
Publications
Publications (113)
We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews ( n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey ( N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors st...
Organizations and their leaders have begun publicly signaling political values in candidate endorsements, statements, and advertisements, yet political action often has negative organizational consequences, including lower public support, financial costs, and reduced trust. We review the costs of organizational politicization, moderators of those c...
Open Science initiatives such as preregistration, publicly available procedures and data, and power analyses have rightly been lauded for increasing the reliability of findings. However, a potentially equally important initiative—aimed at increasing the validity of science—has largely been ignored. Adversarial collaborations (ACs) refer to team sci...
Possibilities are deeply engrained in psychology’s attempts to understand human behavior. This special issue offers diverse and novel insights into the role of possibilities. Two articles on morality show surprising links to mental illness and to counterfactual outcomes: People think doing immoral things is a sign of mental illness, and morally unw...
Accurate assessment of societal change relies on robust metrics, yet the reliability of commonly used indicators is uncertain. We conducted an expert-elicitation-guided (n = 24) comprehensive audit of 99 indicators—including 37 pre-selected and 62 expert-nominated markers—across key domains such as climate, economy, public health, and peace/war. Ea...
For a set of 10 conditions (e.g. homosexuality, obesity, drug addiction), we explored associations between moral judgments, agency evaluations, and perceptions that a condition is a mental illness. In a preregistered study ( n = 1,249 U.S. adults), we found that perceptions of lower agency were associated with decreased moral wrongness judgments, a...
The spread of misinformation is a pressing societal challenge. Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news-sharing decisions. However, researchers disagree on whether accuracy-prompt interventions work for U.S. Republicans/conservatives and whether partisanship moderates the effect. In this preregiste...
We propose a friendly amendment to integrative experiment design (IED), adversarial-collaboration IED, that incentivizes research teams from competing theoretical perspectives to identify zones of the design space where they possess an explanatory edge. This amendment is especially critical in debates that have high policy stakes and carry a strong...
Many scholars conceive modern Western universities as places for open inquiry and relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, some scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses. The present investigation tested whether people have heightened desires to censor information on campuses that is perceived as...
Modern Western societies conceive universities as places for open inquiry and relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, many scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses. The present investigation tested whether people have heightened desires to censor information on campuses that is perceived as thre...
Science is among humanity’s greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific qual...
Variations of the familiar quip, "Women have to be twice as good to go half as far," date back to the early 20th century. This sentiment was true enough in its day, but a lot has changed in the generations since. While women have not reached parity with men in all ways, men have fallen behind women-in some cases far behind-in many domains, includin...
The spread of misinformation is a pressing societal challenge. Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news sharing decisions. However, researchers disagree whether accuracy prompt interventions work for U.S. Republicans/conservatives and whether partisanship moderates the effect. In this pre-registere...
A preregistered meta-analysis, including 244 effect sizes from 85 field audits and 361,645 individual job applications, tested for gender bias in hiring practices in female-stereotypical and gender-balanced as well as male-stereotypical jobs from 1976 to 2020. A “red team” of independent experts was recruited to increase the rigor and robustness of...
Six studies (five preregistered; total n = 5,925 U.S. adults), testing 40 institutions (e.g., journalists, the World Health Organization, police officers) and 30 academic disciplines (e.g., economists, psychologists, public health) found that perceived politicization—the extent to which political values impact an institution’s work—was associated w...
Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, yet little work deliberately explores domains of liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals (some might call them Progressives) are particularly prone to bias about victims’ groups (e.g. women, Black people) and...
In recent years, scientific institutions and their leaders have begun explicitly using their institutional authority to promote particular moral and political values. Editorial boards at prestigious journals have written their own moral priorities into editorial policy and used the prestige of their outlet to endorse their preferred political candi...
With a sample of 228 psychology papers that failed to replicate, we tested whether the trajectory of citation patterns changes following the publication of a failure to replicate. Across models, we found consistent evidence that failing to replicate predicted lower future citations and that the size of this reduction increased over time. In a 14-y...
In recent years, victimhood (sometimes called victim mentality or victimhood mindset) has become a distinctive concept. Rather than referring to the condition of having been harmed, the state (and trait) of victimhood refers to the perception of oneself as a victim. In this sense, victimhood refers to an identity as an individual who has been harme...
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6,181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and cognitive rigidity (i.e., less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general conservatism and social cons...
The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis (Clark, 2022) contends that moral agency and blame deservingness are reserved for agents that are deterred by blame and moral condemnation. Some philosophers and moral psychologists would contend that certain cognitive capacities, such as the abilities to change and control one's behavior or the capacity for "free ac...
If we were naïve observers, we might think of scientists as earnest detectives-carefully sifting through the evidence, pursuing all reasonable leads, and updating their beliefs as needed. We might imagine that scientists get together, exchange notes, form brilliant and empirically accurate beliefs, and then share these state-of-the-science ideas wi...
Grawitch and colleagues (2022) reported three studies that tested whether people evaluate ambiguous cases of sexism differently depending on the genders of those involved. Participants read about an interaction between a banker and a customer in which the banker commented on the customer’s nice appearance, discouraged the customer from making their...
We plan a collaborative research analysis of the original ‘many analysts’ study by Silberzahn et al.1 testing whether European soccer referees were skin-tone biased in giving red cards. Their study concluded that the answer has great model dependency, and in this sense is unclear. Auspurg and Brüderl2 re-analysed the methods and data and argued the...
In three studies (two preregistered; total n = 3,490 ideologically balanced U.S. adults), we examined attitudes toward 40 institutions, organizations, and groups of professionals (e.g., journalists, scientists, the Supreme Court, the World Health Organization, professors, police officers, doctors, the Catholic Church, banks, pharmaceutical companie...
Two preregistered studies from two different platforms with U.S.-based representative samples (N = 1,865) tested the harm-hypervigilance hypothesis in risk assessments of controversial behavioral science. As expected, across six sets of scientific findings, people consistently overestimated others’ harmful reactions with medium-to-large average eff...
Three preregistered studies (N = 2,307 US-based online participants), two with representative samples, tested the harm-hypervigilance hypothesis in risk assessments of controversial behavioral science. As expected, people consistently overestimated harmful behavioral reactions to scientific findings with medium-to-large average effect sizes (and un...
We are in the middle of a great social experiment. The sex ratios of many important institutions in the West are changing, and few institutions more dramatically illustrate this shift than academia. For centuries, academia was primarily a male-led institution. Although many universities in the United States began admitting women in the 1800s, other...
His eldest son assassinated and his second son dimwitted and gullible, Vito’s top priority was to save his youngest and most promising son, Michael. In a meeting with the heads of the Five Families, Vito announced he would retaliate if any injury should befall Michael, even if the misfortunate were apparently as random as a strike of lightning. Few...
Two studies (total n = 1,245) explored the influence of (a) receiving public versus private performance feedback, (b) competing on a team versus solo, and (c) individual differences in team competition participation on cheating behavior. Participants were given opportunities to cheat in an online trivia competition and self-reported their cheating...
A large body of research points to differences in the communal orientation of people from a
lower and higher socio-economic status (SES) background. However, direct evidence for differences in communal attitudes remains scant. In this pre-registered report, we test the hypothesis that SES impacts the incentive value of cues associated with bonding...
General Audience Summary
Behavioral and social scientists have long enjoyed vast discretion in data-analysis choices. This permissive regime has enabled scholars to engage in many deceptive analytic techniques that facilitated false claims and undercut the field’s collective credibility. Recent adoption of new transparency norms has slowed these tr...
Our target article proposed that normalizing adversarial collaborations (ACs) will catalyze progress in the behavioral sciences (Clark et al., 2022). ACs require scholars to state their own positions precisely, address the real (not caricatured) version of their opponents’ claims, and work with their adversary to design studies that all parties agr...
The conscious deliberation over multiple possibilities and the mental simulation of possible future outcomes enable individuals to make better choices. Humans likely evolved the ability to deliberate about their choices and simulate the possible outcomes of different actions. This ability is also likely to have adaptive value for human decision-mak...
Clark and colleagues (2014) proposed a theory of motivated free will beliefs, according to which at least part of free will beliefs and attributions are caused by a desire to hold moral transgressors responsible. Recently, this theory has been challenged. In the following article, we examine the evidence and conclude that, although not dispositive,...
Commentary on Gries, T., Mueller, V., & Jost, J. (2021). The market for belief systems: A formal model of ideological choice. Psychological Inquiry.
Commentary on Gries, T., Mueller, V., & Jost, J. (2021). The market for belief systems: A formal model of ideological choice. Psychological Inquiry.
Determinism is the theory that all events in the universe are completely caused by prior events, such that every occurrence was inevitable from the start of the universe, ranging from the intricate blast of every supernova, to the precise path each leaf travels as it flutters to the ground, to the very words we are writing in this encyclopedia entr...
Published on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202106/pro-blame-bias-the-don-corleone-principle
The social and behavioral sciences have taken a substantial reputational hit over the past decade. Some highly publicized findings have failed to replicate—and those that do replicate often do so with much smaller effect sizes (Camerer et al., 2018; Nosek et al., 2021). Plus some highly touted “science-based” interventions have failed to produce pr...
Available here: https://castfromclay.co.uk/commentary/how-liberal-and-conservative-bias-impacts-policymaking/
The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis applies insights from evolutionary psychology to resolve the apparent conflict between rationalist and intuitionist perspectives on moral judgment. First, people reserve moral condemnation for actors and actions that are likely to be deterred by moral condemnation. This includes intended and controllable actions (con...
Read here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202104/the-gender-gap-in-censorship-support
In fourteen studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize, and thus a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of five studies, n=308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralizati...
This essay was first published on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202103/authoritative- anecdotes-and-feeble-facts.
Facts exist out in the world independent of humans and our ability to comprehend those facts (although George Berkeley might disagree). But in the minds of humans, facts are filte...
This essay was originally published on Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202102/are-liberals-really-more-egalitarian
This essay was originally published on Quillette: https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the- evolutionary-advantages-of-playing-victim/
PUBLISHED FULL TEXT AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360555195_Being_Bad_to_Look_Good_Competence_Reputational_Stakes_Can_Increase_Unethical_Behavior
This essay was first published on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202101/how-we-empower-political-extremists
“They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic… whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or ‘suggestion,’ which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. The...
Modern Western societies conceive universities as places for free thought, open discourse, and the relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, many scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses, suggesting that social justice goals have taken priority over open inquiry and truth-seeking goals. In the pre...
Many feminists and progressives argue that the West is plagued by pervasive misogyny. In fact, this claim is made with such frequency, and is so rarely challenged, that it has become part of the Left's catechism of victimhood, repeated by rote without a second thought. The only real question is how powerful and pernicious the misogyny is. Real-worl...
With a large international sample (n=8,317), the present study examined which beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19 predict 1) following government recommendations, 2) taking health precautions (including mask wearing, social distancing, handwashing, and staying at home), and 3) encouraging others to take health precautions. The results demonstrate...
Academics are a powerful group. They produce the ideas, theories, and data that form our collective human knowledge; they educate the next generation of thinkers and leaders; they are the gatekeepers to scientific journals; they are the experts called upon to advise on many of the most consequential societal issues; they determine who receives fund...
In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives' stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of 5 studies, n = 308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralization mea...
In a naturalistic study (n=38), participants observed a high status or low status confederate steal an Amazon gift card. Some interesting patterns emerged, however, because of the small sample size, the results of this study should be interpreted as only weak evidence for the patterns observed. Participants were more than twice as likely to report...
Full exchange can be found here: https://philpapers.org/archive/CARFWR.pdf
We argue that because of a long history of intergroup conflict and competition, humans evolved to be tribal creatures. Tribalism is not inherently bad, but it can lead to ideological thinking and sacred values that distort cognitive processing of putatively objective information in ways that affirm and strengthen the views and well-being of one’s i...
Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most...
Do desires to punish lead people to attribute more free will to individual actors (motivated free will attributions) and to stronger beliefs in human free will (motivated free will beliefs) as suggested by prior research? Results of 14 new (7 preregistered) studies (n=4,014) demonstrated consistent support for both of these. These findings consiste...
Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most...
Moral cognition, by its very nature, stems from intuitions about what is good and bad, and these intuitions influence moral assessments outside of conscious awareness. However, because humans evolved a shared set of moral intuitions, and are compelled to justify their moral assessments as good and rational (even erroneously) to others, moral virtue...
Science Trends article: https://sciencetrends.com/an-evolutionary-perspective-on-free-will-belief/
This is a data report for a scale that is in development called the Equalitarianism Scale, which measures perceptions of group differences. The data reported here are from 8 studies (n=3274) that tested other hypotheses, but that also included the Equalitarianism Scale. This scale contains 18 items measuring five highly related assumptions about gr...
Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, contending that predominantly liberal social scientists overlooked liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals are prone to bias about relatively low-status groups (e.g. Blacks, women), and specifically are biased...
Baron and Jost (this issue) present three critiques of our meta-analysis demonstrating similar levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives: 1) that the studies we examined were biased toward finding symmetrical bias among liberals and conservatives, 2) that the studies we examined do not measure partisan bias but rather rational Bayesian...
For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral r...
Both liberals and conservatives accuse their political opponents of partisan bias, but is there empirical evidence that one side of the political aisle is indeed more biased than the other? To address this question, we meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias—...
In this essay, we aim to counter and qualify the epiphenomenalist challenge proposed in this special issue on the grounds of empirical and theoretical arguments. The current body of scientific knowledge strongly indicates that conscious thought is a necessary condition for many human behaviors, and therefore, consciousness qualifies as a cause of t...
Both liberals and conservatives accuse their political opponents of partisan bias, but is there empirical evidence that one side of the political aisle is indeed more biased than the other? To address this question, we meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias—t...
This article was published at Science Trends, and is freely available here:
https://sciencetrends.com/believing-addiction-reduces-free-will-may-hamper-efforts-to-quit/
It describes experiments we published at Addictive Behaviors Reports, here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352853217300019
Research has shown that people ascribe more responsibility to morally bad actions than both morally good and neutral ones, suggesting that people do not attribute responsibility to morally good actions. The present work demonstrates that this is not so: People ascribe more free will to morally good than neutral actions (Studies 1a-1b, Mini Meta). S...
Research has shown that people ascribe more responsibility to morally bad actions than both morally good and neutral ones, suggesting that people do not attribute responsibility to morally good actions. The present work demonstrates that this is not so: People ascribe more free will to morally good than neutral actions (Studies 1a-1b, Mini Meta). S...
See updated version here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitarianism_A_source_of_liberal_bias
Both liberals and conservatives accuse their political opponents of partisan bias, but is there empirical evidence that one side of the political aisle is indeed more biased than the other? To address this question, we meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias -...
In fourteen studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs aredriven by stronger and broader tendencies to moralize, and thus a greater motivation to assign responsibility. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of five studies, n = 308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for m...
We suggest consumer research develop an integrative approach that favors neither unconscious nor conscious processes but rather appreciates the contributions and limitations of both, and how they work together. We agree that unconscious processes precede all conscious ones, but we argue that conscious thinking plays a prominent and likely indispens...
Recent work suggests that in addition to actual attitudes, people often have desired attitudes that can vary in their congruence with their actual attitudes. We explored whether desired attitudes motivate goal-congruent outcomes by impacting people's evaluative responses over the effects of actual attitudes. Across four studies, we demonstrated tha...
Punishing wrongdoers is beneficial for group functioning, but can harm individual well-being. Building on research demonstrating that punitive motives underlie free will beliefs, we propose that free will beliefs help justify punitive impulses, thus alleviating the associated distress. In Study 1, trait-level punitiveness predicted heightened level...
See updated full text here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319944911_Forget_the_Folk_Moral_Responsibility_Preservation_Motives_and_Other_Conditions_for_Compatibilism
Questions
Questions (7)
Hi all,
I want to know about every adversarial collaboration ever conducted in the behavioral sciences (or even in other sciences). By adversarial collaboration, I specifically mean projects in which two or more scholars with competing hypotheses worked together to design a new study and collect new data to resolve their scientific dispute (even if they did not call this procedure an "adversarial collaboration").
I review some of them in this paper here:
These include:
Latham et al., 1998
Gilovich, Medvec, & Kahneman, 1998
Mellers et al., 2001
Bateman et al., 2005
Melloni et al., 2021
Schlitz et al., 2006; Wiseman & Schlitz, 1997, 1999
Cowan et al., 2020
Matzke et al., 2015
Corrigan et al., 2012
Van Dessel et al., 2017
Kerr et al., 2018
Alempaki et al., 2019
Cadsby et al., 2008
Koch et al., 2020
Stern & Crawford, 2021
Does anyone know of ones I missed?
I am also interested in all attempts at adversarial collaboration that failed to make it to publication (or even to data collection). But feel free to directly message me with these if you don't want to spill the drama publicly.
I am conducting a meta-analysis of meta-analyses, and one thing we want to do is compare the degree of publication bias between meta-analyses. Meta-analyses report publication bias in dozens of different ways (Egger Z statistic, Egger T tests, Egger Alpha, Egger D, Egger Beta (intercept), Egger's test (p), G2, Moderator Analysis (slope), Moderator Analysis (Q), Moderator I^2, Moderator t, Fail Safe N, P-curve value Z, Bayers Factor, Fisher's exact test, PET (p) and PEESE (p), PET (B) and PEESE (B), Begg's (z), Trim and Fill, Funnel Plot Regression Slope, Begg Rank Correlation Ranked Variances t, Funnel Symmetry/Asymmetry, Rank test p, Begg's Kendall's t, Significant Likelihood Ratio Test X^2, Peters' Significant, Regression test t).
Is there a way to convert these various metrics to a common metric for comparison in the same way various effect sizes can be converted to an r for comparison? If not all of them, can at least some of them be converted? For example, are Egger Z and Begg's z equivalent to a Z-score? And is an Egger D equivalent to a Cohen's d?
Are there any good papers that discuss and compare various publication bias metrics?
We are conducting a 2 year longitudinal study with at least three time points of data collection. A nationally representative sample would be ideal, but attentiveness and retention are more important than nationally representative. My sense is that our best bet will be finding a way to recruit a national sample where we can get email addresses and manage our own sample.
Prolific and CloudResearch (mturk) have options for longitudinal studies, but with subject pool turnover, attrition rates are likely to be too high, and neither platform allows asking for email addresses to contact participants directly. Lucid allows asking for email addresses, but my experience with Lucid participants so far has been pretty bad--unusually high rates of failing attention checks.
How have others recruited and maintained national samples for longitudinal studies?
I am designing a study in which I plan to have everyday people predict the results of an experimental study, and I am wondering whether we know if everyday people are better able to comprehend ratios or percentages. If I want participants to estimate the difference between Condition A and Condition B, would they have an easier time reporting the percentage difference between the groups (e.g., Condition B was 0.1% higher, 10% higher, 10,000% higher than Condition A) or reporting the ratio between the groups (e.g., Condition B was 1.001, 1.1, 100 times higher than Condition A). Does anyone know of any research comparing how intuitive ratios are for people relative to percentages?
I am trying to code the yearly citations for a large set of papers. It seems to me this can only be done for papers where at least one of the authors has a Google Scholar profile. If you search for a paper and at least one of the authors has a Scholar profile, you can click their name, find the paper on their Scholar profile, and then click the paper title, and the paper stats come up with citations per year. Does anyone know if there is another way to get paper stats with yearly citations when the authors do not have a Scholar profile?
I am using Cloud Research Census Matched panels for a study. The price goes up per minute (although I noticed a 10 minute survey and 12 minute survey cost the same), but they do not show how much of the total cost is going to participants. So I do not know how much each participant will be paid in order to put the correct payment on my consent form. Any ideas where I would find this info?
I want to test whether people overestimate the percentage of people who support X and whether this overestimation varies by Y.
I have two conditions: one in which people report whether they support X (0 = No, 1 = Yes) and one in which people estimate the percentage of people who support X (on a 0% to 100% scale). To test whether people overestimate the percentage of people who support X, I can simply look at the percentage of people who support X (let's say 20%), and then conduct a one-sample t-test of the percentage estimates against 20%.
But if I want to know whether people high on Y overestimate support of X more, how would I test this?
