Publications by authors named "John Michael Kelly"

Article Synopsis
  • Scholars are concerned that deep partisan divides among the public pose a risk to American democracy.
  • A large study with over 32,000 participants tested 25 different strategies aimed at decreasing partisan animosity and support for undemocratic practices.
  • Results showed that highlighting relatable individuals with differing beliefs and emphasizing shared identities were effective at reducing animosity, while correcting misunderstandings about rival views helped lessen support for undemocratic actions.
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This meta-analysis explores the long-standing and heavily debated question of whether religiosity is associated with prosocial and antisocial behavior at the individual level. In an analysis of 701 effects across 237 samples, encompassing 811,663 participants, a significant relationship of = .13 was found between religiosity and prosociality (and antisociality, which was treated as its inverse).

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Most humans believe in a god or gods, a belief that may promote prosociality toward coreligionists. A critical question is whether such enhanced prosociality is primarily parochial and confined to the religious ingroup or whether it extends to members of religious outgroups. To address this question, we conducted field and online experiments with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish adults in the Middle East, Fiji, and the United States ( = 4,753).

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Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.

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Forward flow is a new measure that quantifies free thought and predicts creativity (Gray et al., 2019). In his comment, Rossiter (2020) raises some conceptual and measurement concerns about this measure.

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When the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people's streams of free thought-free association-its utility for scientific research is undermined by two open questions: (a) How can streams of thought be quantified? (b) Do such streams predict psychological phenomena? We resolve the first issue-quantification-by presenting a new metric, "forward flow," that uses latent semantic analysis to capture the semantic evolution of thoughts over time (i.e.

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