We are proud to highlight Raihan Alam, a third-year PhD student in Management, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and CARTA Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny student, for his recent publications! Raihan researches the causes and consequences of moral disagreement, with applications to criminal justice, extremism, and political polarization.
In his work “Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation,” he shows that paying third parties to punish undermines cooperation by degrading the socio-moral signal of punishing, leading people to become less trusting of punishers and less cooperative with anonymous strangers.
In “Partisan Animosity as Blame: A Unifying and Generative Framework for Understanding and Transforming Affective Polarization in the Political Sphere,” he argues that partisan animosity is best understood as a form of blame toward political outgroups for perceived norm-violations, offering a unifying framework for understanding rising affective polarization and offers new strategies for reducing it.
Read Raihan’s papers and learn more about his work:
- Alam, R., & Gill, M. (2026). Partisan Animosity as Blame: A Unifying and Generative Framework for Understanding and Transforming Affective Polarization in the Political Sphere. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 0(0).
- R. Alam, & T.S. Rai, Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (34) e2508479122 (2025).
