Student Publication Prize awarded to MSU grad student Abby Cassario
November 6, 2025 - Shelly DeJong
Congratulations to Abby Cassario, a fourth-year graduate student in the social/personality research area in the MSU Department of Psychology, on being awarded a 2025 Student Publication Prize for her article, “Testing Theories of Threat, Individual Difference, and Ideology: Little Evidence of Personality Based Individual Differences in Ideological Responses to Threat.”
Given by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), this award recognizes excellence in research by graduate student members. With over 7500 members, SPSP strives to advance the science, teaching, and application of personality and social psychology.
“I’m very grateful for this recognition. It’s rewarding to know that others feel this work contributes to conversations in the field about how societal circumstances effect (or do not effect) people’s beliefs,” said Cassario. “The award is also a reflection of the excellent mentorship and support I’ve received here at MSU from my advisor, labmates, and the broader MSU social science community.”
Cassario’s research explores how socialization and individual differences shape people’s belief systems, and relatedly, how characteristics of people’s belief systems affect features of their individual attitudes like moral conviction or extremity.
Her article, written with advisor Dr. Mark Brandt, tests the conservative shift hypothesis across five ecological threats including unemployment, immigration, racial diversity, COVID-19, and violent crime. They also tested whether openness to experience and conscientiousness predict who is likely to shift to the right in the face of threat.
Cassario was first drawn to studying belief dynamics during the pandemic to help understand why people close to her were experiencing dramatic shifts in their beliefs and belief systems, which political psychology literature suggests as being quite rare.
“My work aims to understand why beliefs are usually so stable but sometimes shift in surprising ways across issues and identities. By ruling out one prominent explanation for this kind of change, this line of research brings me one step closer to understanding when and why beliefs sometimes change,” said Cassario.
Winners of the award receive a plaque at the Awards Ceremony held during the SPSP Annual Convention, as well as a complimentary one-year SPSP membership. A full list of awardees can be found here.