Social Psychology in the Information Age: Postscript to the preceding

Monday, July 28, 2025

Postscript to the preceding

This deserves a proper quote, regarding the decline of US academia:

Some of this was foreseeable. The high school graduate demographic is shrinking, and college and university tuition rates were growing unsustainably. But Trump’s personal attacks on Harvard and other elite universities are erasing the old social contract between the government and academia. On top of that, Trump’s attack on immigration is discouraging foreign student enrollment, and these students were paying full tuition, subsidizing tuition for domestic students. The US higher education brand is tarnished by Trump policies and may never recover. US talent—graduate students, postdocs, faculty—are looking abroad and will take their intellectual capital with them.

Not much can be done about the decreased number of available high school grads (still our major source of students at most universities and colleges). The same thing occurred after the Baby Boom generation reached their college years. Give it a generation and there will be another increase in available potential traditional students, assuming there are sufficient colleges and universities left in the US by then. The unsustainable tuition rates are definitely an own-goal by our politicians starting approximately during the Reagan era onward. Don't even get me started on the student loan bubble. Trump does manage to make things worse, and I say that knowing that some of my readership will be offended. So it goes. The reputational damage is something that I am not sure can be undone. I am usually optimistic, but I don't really see how US higher ed comes back from what will be a catastrophic four years. Once universities begin obeying in advance, allowing a White House occupant (of any party, but for now since it's Trump we'll keep our focus there) to extort them, they simply become institutions that are not to be trusted. Fear and expedience are not acceptable excuses, and those administering these once-fine institutions will not be remembered fondly, to put it politely.

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About

Hi! I am A. James Benjamin, Jr., PhD. Most folks call me James or JB eventually.

I am an educator trained as a social psychologist. I work as an Associate Professor at University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. I earned my PhD from University of Missouri-Columbia in 2000. Much of my research has touched on cognitive and behavioral effects of aggression-related cues (e.g., video games and weapon images), increasingly from a critical and skeptical perspective. I have also examined person variables such as authoritarianism and short-term media exposure in relation to attitudes toward violence and toward torture. My more recent interests involve the psychometric properties of various measures of aggressive cognition that are commonly used by aggression researchers. My work intersects with that of related researchers in areas such as Media Communication.

As an educator, I primarily teach methodology courses and the undergraduate survey course in social psychology. I also regularly teach the introductory psychology course. I make a point of introducing students at all levels to the replication crisis. Increasingly, I am trying interactive activities to engage students to become more critical readers of the research literature in my field.

I use this blog to express my own professional and personal perspectives. This blog is completely independent of any organizations with which I am affiliated. Assume that the views I express here are exclusively mine and do not reflect the views of any employer.