Jan Pfänder
@janpfa.bsky.social
📤 192
📥 185
📝 63
phd student
https://janpfander.github.io/
pinned post!
How much do people really reject science? New paper out
doi.org/10.1177/0963...
In four studies, we asked Americans—including flat Earthers, climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics—whether they accepted basic scientific facts. The result? A surprisingly high level of agreement. 👇
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Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States - Jan Pfänder, Lou Kerzreho, Hugo Mercier, 2025
Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This m...
https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625251364407
8 months ago
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Julia M. Rohrer
about 2 months ago
Taking a look at Castro-Schilo & Grimm about "residualized change vs diff scores" -- interesting case of how spelling out estimands affects reasoning. Estimand of interest: "effect of prior cohabitation on change in relationship satisfaction pre/post marriage">
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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Brendan Nyhan
about 2 months ago
The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!
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Jan Pfänder
lionkircheis.bsky.social
about 2 months ago
My first paper is out today in Environmental Research Letters. Wildfire smoke doesn't just harm your lungs; it's also linked to violence. Using 11 years of data from Seattle, I find that smoke days see 3.6% more violent assaults. 🧵 A short thread on what was found.
doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae436c
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Richard McElreath 🐈⬛
about 2 months ago
"the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper." Retraction of 2023 paper that did not use the reported variables. The replication report is astonishing
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Pre-publication peer review remains undefeated in laundering bullshit
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Peter Tennant
about 2 months ago
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/
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Benoît de Courson
2 months ago
🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴 Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout ! 📌
www.gallicagram.com
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Jan Pfänder
3 months ago
Breaking news: The
#NCCR
#CLIM+
on "Climate Extremes & Society" will be funded by the
@snf-fns.ch
in the coming 4 years! With 47 PIs, 20 institutions & 22 stakeholders from
#health
to
#finance
&
#agriculture
, it will unite climate expertise from both natural & social science!
nccr-climplus.ch
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Madalina Vlasceanu, PhD
3 months ago
What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by
@dgoldwert.bsky.social
we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5
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Felix Thoemmes
3 months ago
Played around with Causion by
@isager.bsky.social
It's an impressive teaching tool for causal inference... and it also really pretty. Amazing color scheme and slick interface. Shown below a demonstration of an extended front-door DAG in Causion.
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Alex Coppock
3 months ago
🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on
repdata.com
3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details:
alexandercoppock.com/replication_...
applications open Feb 1 please repost!
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Jamie Cummins
3 months ago
Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵
regcheck.app
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RegCheck
RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.
https://regcheck.app
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Joe Bak-Coleman
3 months ago
Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry? New from me,
@cailinmeister.bsky.social
,
@jevinwest.bsky.social
and
@carlbergstrom.com
. Thread tomorrow.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507
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Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research
To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507
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Mark A. Hanson
3 months ago
We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?
arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563
A 🧵 1/n
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
3 months ago
Too many significance tests!! Made this little graphic for my
#stats
class, showing the various kinds of (N)HST and how interpreting confidence intervals can replace all of them. Made with
#rstats
#ggplot
(duh)
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Hugo Mercier
4 months ago
Interesting megastudy on the (in)effectiveness of climate messaging: tiny effects on attitudes, no effects on donation
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"Persuasiveness varied little across party lines", another win for Persuasion in Parallel
@aecoppock.bsky.social
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A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages - Nature Climate Change
How to effectively communicate climate change to the public has long been studied and debated. Through a registered report megastudy, researchers tested the ten most-cited climate change messaging str...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02536-2
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Brendan Nyhan
5 months ago
Kids: Inspect your data (yikes)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/b...
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Julia M. Rohrer
5 months ago
1. Transparency is necessary for credibility 2. Transparency is hard to change 3. Require transparency* 4. Transparency is not magic 5. Journals are part of problem 6. Expect more from journals 7. Peer review is not magic 8. A crisis can look a lot like „normal“ science 9. Meta-analysis is not magic
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Fabian Dablander
5 months ago
🚨 Mapping climate change coverage In a new preprint, Simon Wimmer,
@jmbh.bsky.social
, and I analyzed over 50,000 articles about climate change from major German newspapers across the political spectrum (2010-2024) using large language models 🧵 🔗 Link:
osf.io/preprints/so...
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Mark A. Hanson
5 months ago
Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc). They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee! Strain:
bit.ly/StrainQSS
Strain explorer β:
pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo...
#SciPub
#ResearchIntegrity
#AcademicSky
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Lisa Oswald
6 months ago
We have a new preprint:
osf.io/preprints/so...
What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
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Brendan Nyhan
5 months ago
Experimental participants to us
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Trust in science is increasingly being studied across the globe—which is good news. However, expanding geographic coverage alone isn’t enough.
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
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Redirecting
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2025.102215
5 months ago
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Dan Quintana
5 months ago
There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews
doi.org/10.1525/coll...
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Josh McCrain
5 months ago
new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
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Fabian Dablander
5 months ago
🚨Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions In a new preprint,
@colognaviktoria.bsky.social
,
@maiensachis.bsky.social
,
@jmbh.bsky.social
& I examine techno-optimism among 9,199 scientists and how it relates to their civic engagement and lifestyle choices🧵 🔗 Link:
tinyurl.com/hh94huzv
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Marius Mercier
5 months ago
🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?
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🎉 You’ve exceeded even our most optimistic expectations — we received 107 intervention proposals. THANK YOU! 🕵 Our advisory board will now begin reviewing all interventions. 🔗 More information:
janpfander.github.io/trust_climat...
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5 months ago
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Mark A. Hanson
6 months ago
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain:
arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain:
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly:
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
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Julia M. Rohrer
6 months ago
"For instance, randomized controlled trials could explicitly manipulate multilingualism"
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Brendan Nyhan
6 months ago
Fascinating economics job market paper by Jens Oehlen on the effects of Enigma codebreaking and how it interacted with military/intelligence strategy
jensoehlen.github.io/uploads/Enig...
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Petter Törnberg
6 months ago
LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵
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Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04195
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Matti Vuorre
6 months ago
I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at
@tilburg-university.bsky.social
. We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.
tiu.nu/22989
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Matti Vuorre
6 months ago
Wrote a little interactive webapp for creating psyarxiv coauthorship networks, try it out:
vuorre.com/psyarxiv-das...
Feedback welcome:
github.com/mvuorre/psya...
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⏰ 1 week left to submit your intervention to strengthen trust in climate scientists in the U.S. — come join us in this megastudy!
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6 months ago
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Julia M. Rohrer
6 months ago
This is an excellent point that generalizes. Researchers often defend suboptimal practices by referring to future studies with better designs. But: Why would anybody run those studies when you can just throw a bunch of variables into a regression and make sweeping "preliminary" claims?
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Marlene Altenmüller
7 months ago
✨ LUCKY COINCIDENCES ✨ Have you ever come across a surprising, accidental discovery that felt meaningful and motivated you to further engage with it? In our new paper now out in JASP (
doi.org/10.1111/jasp...
), we explore such serendipitous experiences in museums and beyond. 1/5 🧵
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Lucky Coincidences: Experiencing Serendipity in Museums and Beyond
Serendipity is the unintentional, accidental discovery of something new or surprising that feels positive and meaningful for the individual. Four studies (N1 = 1638; N2 = 279; N3 = 520; N4 = 452) exa...
https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.70020
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Carl T. Bergstrom
9 months ago
1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.
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RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://www.scrippsnews.com/health/rfk-jr-in-interview-with-scripps-news-trusting-the-experts-is-not-science
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Viktoria Cologna
6 months ago
Climate science is facing significant opposition in the US. Today we are launching the collaborative Strengthening Trust in Climate Scientists Megastudy 📈 Find out more and join our efforts 👇🧵
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Help us strengthen trust in climate scientists in the US! Join our megastudy 👇
6 months ago
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Jamie Cummins
7 months ago
Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵
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The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397
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Dietram A. Scheufele
8 months ago
"Acceptance of the scientific consensus was very high in the sample as a whole (95.1%), but also in every sub-sample (e.g. no trust in science: 87.3%) ... [P]eople are motivated to reject specific scientific beliefs, and not science as a whole."
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09636625251364407
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Dan Vergano
8 months ago
Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
high in sample as a whole (95.1%) "also in every sub-sample (e.g. no trust in science: 87.3%; complete endorsement of flat Earth theory: 87.2%" "motivated to reject specific scientific beliefs"
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Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States - Jan Pfänder, Lou Kerzreho, Hugo Mercier, 2025
Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This m...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09636625251364407
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How much do people really reject science? New paper out
doi.org/10.1177/0963...
In four studies, we asked Americans—including flat Earthers, climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics—whether they accepted basic scientific facts. The result? A surprisingly high level of agreement. 👇
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Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States - Jan Pfänder, Lou Kerzreho, Hugo Mercier, 2025
Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This m...
https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625251364407
8 months ago
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Julia M. Rohrer
8 months ago
Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w
@vincentab.bsky.social
) Preprint:
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Website:
j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...
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Nicolas Beauvais
8 months ago
Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢 With Aikaterini Voudouri,
@boissinesther.bsky.social
&
@wimdeneys.bsky.social
we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments. 🔗Full paper:
shorturl.at/JTeTi
Quick thread below!
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Viktoria Cologna
10 months ago
🚨 How do exposure to extreme weather events and the subjective attribution of these events to climate change relate to climate policy support across the world? 🔥🌎 Find out more in our OA article published in Nature Climate Change 👇 1/7 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Extreme weather event attribution predicts climate policy support across the world - Nature Climate Change
Literature produced inconsistent findings regarding the links between extreme weather events and climate policy support across regions, populations and events. This global study offers a holistic asse...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02372-4
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Daniel Lakens
10 months ago
Very excited to publicly share news about a new tool, Papercheck, that
@debruine.bsky.social
and me started to develop more than a year ago! In an introductory blog post, we explain our philosophy to automatically check scientific papers for best practices.
daniellakens.blogspot.com/2025/06/intr...
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Introducing Papercheck
Introducing Papercheck Introducing Papercheck An Automated Tool to Check for Best Practices in Scientifi...
https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2025/06/introducing-papercheck.html
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Nature Human Behaviour
10 months ago
How do laypeople make sense of scientific explanations? This new Article from
@cruzf.bsky.social
&
@tanialombrozo.bsky.social
looks at the role of jargon. They find that people find explanations with jargon satisfying, even though jargon reduces understanding.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon - Nature Human Behaviour
Cruz and Lombrozo examine how laypeople make sense of scientific explanations and find that although jargon reduces understanding, for short explanations, jargon makes the explanation more satisfying.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02227-0
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Randall Munroe
11 months ago
Good Science
xkcd.com/3101/
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Jon Green
11 months ago
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