Ashwin Rao

Thank you Kristina. Adding this in

The Cult of Therapy | No Mercy / No Malice “Don’t read the comments,” I tell people, just before I have a drink and … read the comments. I knew my book Notes on Being a Man would spark controversy, as you get the most flak when you’re over the...

Therapy is a good thing. But mental health influencers position therapy as a prerequisite for a better life, rendering it a Birkin bag for your feelings (i.e., a luxury good) for $200/hour.

I am recruiting (Canadian🇨🇦) graduate students at York University for Fall 2026 in Social and Personality Psychology! If you are interested in misinformation, political polarization, and/or computational social science, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Will be presenting my @icwsm.bsky.social paper Polarized Online Discourse on Abortion in Session 5 on Tuesday, June 24 at 1:30PM in Copenhagen🇩🇰 We find - Symmetric spikes in hostility, use of distinct frames and hostility to the out-group frames.
Would love to see y’all there or chat after!

🧵 Excited to present at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we introduce a novel framework for modeling narrative evolution in streaming text data. Link here: arxiv.org/abs/2409.07684

While both sides use distinct frames (e.g., liberals on bodily autonomy, conservatives on fetal personhood), each provokes asymmetric hostility from the other. These patterns reinforce polarization and limit mutual understanding.

Analyzing 3.5M tweets, we examine how ideological divides shape hostility in abortion debates. We find that liberals & conservatives mirror each other’s hostile rhetoric, with spikes around key events.

🚨Late post: Paper with Anna Chang @qkzhong.bsky.social @kristinalerman.bsky.social and Magdalena Wojcieszak- Polarized Online Discourse on Abortion: Frames and Hostile Expressions among Liberals and Conservatives was accepted to @icwsm.bsky.social ! arxiv.org/pdf/2311.16831

Paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, Buddhika Nettasinghe and Allon Percus accepted at TheWebConf 2025. We quantify affective polarization - in-group favoritism & out-group animosity and how it drives divisions on masking & lockdowns. arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14414