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 🧵

"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...

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"

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. 👇

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...

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!

🚨 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...

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...

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...

Good Science xkcd.com/3101/

Ooh, I've run a session on basically "How to Conference" for the undergrad diversity program at the Evolution conference for the past few years. Some of what I cover:

The country with the most sophisticated intelligence capabilities in the world, and the president is holding up "a months-old blog post" from an obscure, conspiracy-mongering site "featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo" while making allegations against South Africa to its president

If you randomize (or randomise) something, then everything in your study is causal, right?

Quarto and Mac users, help me out please. I'm regularly struggling to locally render the (git-tracked) quarto website for my course on my Macbook. Weird duplicates pop up, I have to delete the "/site" folder by hand every time and re-generate everything to avoid it. Do you share this experience?

Data Colada has submitted a motion for sanction against Francesca Gino and her former lawyer team. I hope the court rules in their favor. It will be a powerful message that sleuths can expose fake research without fearing legal consequences. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Out now - National Academies consensus report on Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science 🧪 It was a privilege to serve as one of the 15 committee members from a wide range of scientific disciplines who put this report together. Quick 🧵1/ www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/und...

This Thursday I will give a talk on (causal) mediation analysis -- happy to have finally worked out what I want to tell people. And happy to pilot a new mode of slide sharing: just putting them on my website (juliarohrer.com/resources/)

📚😅🎉 Yay!! I just submitted the complete manuscript of my upcoming book to the publisher! Learn to easily and clearly interpret (almost) any stats model w/ R or Python. Simple ideas, consistent workflow, powerful tools, detailed case studies. Read it for free @ marginaleffects.com #RStats #PyData

NSF will no longer fund research on misinformation and is stopping grants, arguing that it could infringe on free speech “in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate”. Chilling to see even if it’s not a surprise. 🧪 www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

🎉 Just published in Nature Human Behavior 🎉 Do liberals or conservatives in the US trust scientists more? You might assume it's liberals, but studies often fail to consider the diversity of scientific disciplines! 🔬 nature.com/articles/s41... [1/6]🧵

Open #postdoc position in #science #communication at @ikmz.bsky.social – one that I fully and genuinely recommend. I've worked 6+ years in this team, and it's these very colleagues, NB @mss7676.bsky.social, and the exceptional research conditions that make me sad to leave #IKMZ soon 🙏 ➡️ t.uzh.ch/1PM

🧠📰 Disagreement helps build trust in science. A new study shows people trust scientists less when news includes disagreement – especially if they cannot tell experts from non-experts. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm #TrustInScience 🧪

Updated syllabi for my courses on political misinformation and conspiracy theories sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/files/... and experiments in politics sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/files/...

Looking forward to giving yet another talk at the Cognition Academy at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. This is a bit of an ambitious one: causal graphs, longitudinal data, natural experiments. Slides: osf.io/mcd5h

🌍 We are launching a new #ManyLabs!!! Join the Heat & Cognition project! We're studying how extreme heat affects human thinking, social behavior & well-being — globally. Contribute & co-author: 🔗 Info: heatandmind.wordpress.com 📋 Sign up: www.soscisurvey.de/HeatandCogni... #EnvironmentalPsychology

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words! If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance. www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting this summer? I am hiring for two PhD positions at the University of Witten/Herdecke.

Great keynote talk by @janpfa.bsky.social & @sachaltay.bsky.social at the inauguration of the 3rd edition of the #InfoxsurSeine2025 seminar. infoxsurseine.org/2025/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New comment by @faridanvari.bsky.social and friends arguing that psychology is fragmented into the study of too many constructs and measures with too few links. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking forward to another iteration of my „Everything is Causal Inference“ talk, this time at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, courtesy of @conjugateprior.org. This is probably the most opinionated talk from my œuvre, so I guess I will have to write it down at some point... osf.io/43sn7

New preprint alert with @tspampatti.bsky.social, Sebastian Gluth, Kim-Pong Tam and Ulf Hahnel! What messages about climate change do people consume? In our pre-registered three-country study, we find that people prefer to read messages that are aligned with their initial climate beliefs. (1/5)

A systematic review and meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour shows that people discern true from false news with ease. When making mistakes, people err on the side of skepticism and rate true news as false, instead of being fooled by false news. https://go.nature.com/4h6TQZC 🧪

New cultural evolution modelling paper with @bdecourson.bsky.social on @pnas.org! "Weak individual preferences stabilize culture" A quick 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This paper is *so* good! The literature on external & construct validity often feels rather fuzzy to me. This one hits different — this feels like the right framework to reason more clearly about generalization, causality, even replication. It made a lot of things come together in my head!>

In this SRMA, @janpfa.bsky.social and @sachaltay.bsky.social find that people rate true news as more accurate than false news and are better at rating false news as false than at rating true news as true. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This paper was a lot of work and hides many cool findings, notably in Supplement. In this thread I present a few findings that you may have missed 👇

Out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social Can people tell true from false news? Yes! Our meta-analysis shows that people rate true news as more accurate than false news (d = 1.12) and were better at spotting false news than at recognizing true news (d = 0.32). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New blog post! Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly. So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost. www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...

This excellent interactive tutorial on misleading data visualizations explores the idea of a "counter chart" — the graph you draw in response to refute a misleading claims flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

Rdatasets is a collection of 2300 free and documented datasets in CSV format. It's a great resource for teaching and exploration! The new `get_dataset()` function from the {marginaleffects} 📦 allows you to search and load them directly in #Rstats. vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/ar...

Out now open access at @ajpseditor.bsky.social. 194 potential exclusion-restriction violations for studies using weather as an instrumental variable onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

We present: A new instrument to measure people’s science literacy. #OpenAccess in #ScienceCommunication: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... 📢 It’s a 14-item #survey scale in English, German, French and Italian covering three key dimensions of science literacy: civic, media and cognitive literacy 💡

New WP! The illusory truth effect (repetition -> belief) is core to psych of beliefs, & thought to be a deep bias impacting misinfo, persuasion & advertising Why would cognition include such a flaw? We argue it is a rational adaptation to high-quality info environments 🧵1/