Social Psychologist. Associate Professor of Psychology at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Researches motivation and social-psych interventions to reduce inequality. On sabbatical 2025-2026 in Berlin as a Fellow of the @wiko-berlin.bsky.social
Elizabeth Canning
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This study of four cohorts of French schoolchildren shows that the gender gap in math (girls falling behind) begins essentially immediately as soon as kids start school. They use the natural variation in kids' ages at school start to show that it's school entry, not age, that triggers the change.
New Publication with @neugebauer.bsky.social in Sociological Science! Factorial surveys are widely used to predict real-world decisions, but are they valid? Our results raise concerns when it comes to predicting real-world decisions from factorial survey responses (1)
Thanks to The Conversation for inviting me to share my "unsung hero of science", who I chose to be Carolyn Wood Sherif 💘
theconversation.com/my-unsung-he...
Identity-Based Motivation
"People can infer that difficulty signals self-relevance and value (difficulty-as-importance – this is important to me, 'no pain, no gain') and self-irrelevance and low odds of success (difficulty-as-impossibility – this is not for me, 'know when to walk away').
Climate change impacts are here, but public support for action remains polarized. Which climate messages move people?
In a ~13,500-person megastudy, we tested 10 of the most-cited messages. Six increased pro-environmental attitudes in the U.S.—but only by 1–4 percentage points. 🧵
Seems like we should know something about how grading affects motivation, right? Surprisingly, the research literature hasn't been synthesized - until now! Sievers et al reviewed 34 studies and identified what we (don't) know and what research needs to happen next. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
My latest column is an interview with renowned historian of higher ed, Eddie Cole. Come for learning about HBCUs and stay for his thoughts on why accreditation is the biggest issue we're not talking enough about in higher ed.
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...
Each year, people speak 338 less words per day (on average). These effects accumulate. In 2019, people were speaking 28% less words each day than in 2005 (!).
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Before moving to Berlin for my sabbatical, I spoke with Bethany Wilinski on her podcast. We discussed burnout, mid-career challenges, daily life at an IAS, logistics of moving a family abroad, & how to structure your time during a sabbatical.
@wiko-berlin.bsky.social
youtu.be/yF8RsR3W-V0?...
Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123
Boys and girls exhibit very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a gender gap in favour of boys becomes highly significant after 4 months of schooling, which increases with years of schooling,&...
Introduction-Objective
We outline and test three key assumptions of identity-based motivation theory. First, in everyday life, people draw both difficulty-as-importance and difficulty-as-impossibili.....
Classroom-level grading policies are crucial in shaping students’ academic motivation, yet educational psychologists for the most part have not studied their direct impact. Instead, most existing w...
www.tandfonline.com
Eddie R. Cole explores the complicated history around protecting scholars at historically Black colleges and universities and the risks of political interference in accreditation.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
