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Curtis Puryear, PhD
CV
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Bluesky
Curtis Puryear, PhD
CV
Google Scholar
Twitter
Bluesky
CV
Google Scholar
Twitter
Bluesky

Moral Cognition in the Social Media Era

Throughout history humans have navigated dilemmas that arise from living in groups – figuring out who to trust, who to fight, and what threats deserve our attention. Our minds have evolved to help us resolve these social dilemmas, but over the past 30 years, our social lives have increasingly moved to online environments that differ considerably from those we evolved in. My work investigates how these novel environment interface with our social minds, affecting our moral beliefs and how we perceive political opponents and outgroup members.

In my most recent work, I developed new measurement tools to quantify societal trends in moralization in the social media era. We combined natural language processing techniques with large corpora – spanning billions of social media comments and hundreds of thousands of traditional media texts – to test whether people increasingly view cultural topics through a moral lens. Our findings revealed distinctive increases in moralization on social media platforms and identified multiple user dynamics explained these increases.

See here for a summary of the paper; here for the preprint; and here for materials we used to measure moralization (***including a new, validated dictionary of moral words***).

Other selected publications:

Dillion, D., Puryear, C., Li, L., Chiquito, A., & Gray, K. (2024). National politics ignites more talk of morality and power than local politics. PNAS Nexus. [Manscript Available at: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae345/7756551 ]

Puryear, C., & Vandello, J. A., and Gray, K. (2024). Moral panics on social media are fueled by signals of virality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [Manuscript Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/t9dre]

Puryear, C., & Vandello, J. A. (2019). Inflammatory comments elicit less outrage when made in anonymous online contexts. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 10, 895-902.

Building Understanding in a Divided World

People are more divided than ever, and the modern world often rewards hot takes and divisive language over dialogue that fosters understanding. My work identifies actionable strategies that people can employ in their daily lives to have better conversation about morality and politics. This work reveals how people can leverage personal experiences, wise reasoning, and reminders of shared morality to build understanding. My current work in this area investigates how we can redesign social media to incentivize more productive conversation.

Puryear, C., Kubin, E., Schein, C., Bigman, Y., & Gray, K. (2024). People Believe Political Opponents Accept Blatant Moral Wrongs, Fueling Partisan Divides. PNAS Nexus [Manuscript available at: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/7/pgae244/7712370]

Puryear, C., & Gray, K. (2024). Using “balanced pragmatism” in political discussions increases cross-partisan respect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [Manuscript Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yhpdt]

Kubin, E., Puryear, C., Schein, C., & Gray, K. (2021). Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(6). [Manuscript available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2008389118]

Selected Popular Press:

People overestimate political opponents’ immorality. Scientific American.  

From doomscrolling to moral panic, how social media hijacks your social mind. SPSP Character & Context Blog.

The psychological value of balanced pragmatism. Psychology Today.

Despite Facebook ban of Donald Trump, social media remains a mess, Here’s how to fix it. USAToday.