Social connection plays a central role in people's everyday lives. Although researchers have traditionally focused on the benefits of experiencing an enduring sense of social connection, recent research has also begun to explore the contextual factors that shape momentary feeling of social connection. To date, however, no psychological scales have been developed to measure state social connection. To address this gap, we developed the 10-item UBC State Social Connection Scale (UBC-SSCS). In Study 1, we generated and refined our initial pool of items and confirmed our hypothesized factor structure in a large university sample. In Studies 2 to 3, we established several forms of validity. We provide foundational evidence that the UBC-SSCS is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing momentary feelings of social connection. Our exploratory findings also suggest that researchers can substantially increase their statistical power using state (vs. trait) measures to capture fluctuations in feelings of social connection.
Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say because people find the incivility morally distasteful. Studies 1a and 1b examined the relationship between uncivil language and followership in the Twitter feeds of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, finding incivility reduced their following on the platform. In Studies 2-3, we manipulated how uncivil a number of politicians were and found that incivility consistently depressed interest in what they had to say. These effects of incivility are generalized to both political allies and opponents. Observers' moral disapproval of the incivility mediated the diminished interest, suppressing the attention-grabbing nature of incivility. Altogether, our findings indicate that the public reacts more negatively to political incivility than previously thought.

