- Me: "write a small function that does one thing" - LLM: would you like me to add a calculation for the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything? - Me: [deletes, includes print("42")].

Self-control in daily life is more than willpower — but how well do commonly used trait scales capture this recent, broader view on self-control? New preprint with @kaihorstmann.bsky.social & @mhennecke.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps... Short summary below.

So true. Good to avoid unnecessary suffering!

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.

@madselk.bsky.social, @benansell.bsky.social, Laure Bokobza, @aslicansunar.bsky.social, @mhaslberger.bsky.social, and @jacobnyrup.bsky.social. 2025. ‘Why Is It so Hard to Counteract Wealth Inequality? Evidence from the United Kingdom’. World Politics. 77(3): 515–61. muse.jhu.edu/article/964464

Sitting here bleary after another poor night's sleep, disinclined to engage in a day of cognitive effort, this chart from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com really strikes home on.ft.com/4eFZG4l

Great PSA! To echo: please don't use the chat window (your research decisions are being made for you). Send me a message and I will happily provide you with code to prompt OpenAI's model endpoints and store the conversational context throughout.

WIRED loves Fairphone and everything it stands for—but people just aren’t buying its devices, and the few who have don’t need to upgrade. www.wired.com/story/fairph...

Great article linked below. I was unaware journals could negotiate and inflate the metric by excluding article types. I suppose that is part of the reason why there are always a bunch of different article types. Yet another example of Goodhart's Law! journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Registration is open for the Summer School on Computational Decision Sciences, 8–12 Sept Join us in London for a week of cutting-edge research on decision-making, AI, cognitive science and more! (free, register by 11Aug) center-decision-sciences.com/cds-summer-s... #PsychSciSky 🧠 #neuroskyence🧪

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

#CDRLeeds 's Simon Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social and colleagues have received an AFSG Minor Exploratory Grant (afsg.org) to improve use of the Problem Gambling Severity Index. They'll attempt identifying different problematic gambling profiles using the score and natural language processing tools.

New work by Sudeep Bhatia @sdpbht.bsky.social, Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang, and @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social Lukasz Walasek -- now out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Would you like to extract and exploit textual data from the internet? No matter whether you want to analyse product reviews, or political opinions, #CDRLeeds 4-day workshop Webtext2Insight will teach you how to do it. 9-12 June 2025 in Leeds. More info and registration: shorturl.at/JCiKT

We're running a workshop - Webtext2Insight Intro workshop: Scraping, NLP, and GenAI for Business & Research. 📅 Dates: 9-12 June 📍 Location: Leeds University Business School, UK 👩‍🏫 Instructors: @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social , @xingjiewei.bsky.social, and I. 💻 Python (AI tools: Hugging Face, OpenAI API)

Pleased to announce that @sdpbht.bsky.social, @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang and I published this work in @pnas.org last month. A particularly intricate project I'm thankful to have been part of! Going from unstructured text to an attribute repr. of decisions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🧵New paper out in Cognition Why do people moralize harmless carnal sins (e.g. gluttony, masturbation)? @danielnettle.bsky.social & I find that these behaviors activate reciprocity-based moral judgment—no need for a distinct "purity" module. 50 days free link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l18D2Hx2-...

We will soon be announcing a workshop 9-12 June at the Centre for Decision Research in Leeds, UK on webscraping, natural language processing and generative AI for research and business. Watch this space! #behsci #ai #scraping #nlp

Thrilled to share @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Philip Newall, and I were selected for an AFSG exploratory grant! We'll study how gambling experiences relate to the main gambling harm measuring tool—the PGSI. Understanding the person behind PGSI scores will enable better harm detection/prevention.

Interesting new work on fatigue and self-control! We must keep developing our understanding of when lapses of self-control are likely to occur. The replication failure of ego depletion still leaves a lot to explore.

A new amazing episode of the Minds Matter podcast - built enviromenment and well-being! #philosophy #neuroskyence

Participant Recruitment! Looking for workers within the healthcare sector to take part in a 15-minute survey about workers' health and engagement in workplace mental health support (Prize draw to win up to £150 worth of shopping vouchers). Survey link - warwick.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

🚨 Out in Decision: are you interested in research on impulsivity, self-control, or time preferences, but are not quite sure how they fit together - look no further! @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social @hohwy.bsky.social A. Verdejo-Garcia and I offer a conceptual analysis with empirical evidence. #behsci

@lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Philip Newall and I wrote a blog about our recent paper on the lived experiences of gambling harm. The discussions on online gambling fora are striking. From gambling operators reopening accounts after closure to ruined marriages.

@lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, @hohwy.bsky.social, Antonio Verdejo-Garcia and I published an article in Decision on the relationships between time preferences, impulsivity, and self-control. We were invited by the APA to write a non-technical snippet about it here: www.growkudos.com/publications...

We have two posts open at lecturer level to candidates working in any subfield of political theory (please note: you need only apply for one of the advertised posts to be considered for both) 2/ www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMA319/l...

Does anybody know when the UK is supposed to be insulated from natural gas determining the marginal price of electricity? Coming off the back of the 6.4% cap increase by Ofgem, it seems consumers are worried about when we will start to see the benefits of all that cheap energy generation.

The custom Behavioral Science feed has reached 100 followers! Testament to the fact that this platform is gaining traction with social scientists bsky.app/profile/did:...

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Our findings highlight that both self-report accuracy and selective participation are competing biases and sources of poor reproducibility for biobank-scale research” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More PhD positions advertised via the ESRC: lssi.leeds.ac.uk/engagement-p...

Hi folks! PhD opportunities are available in Leeds University Business School, and three of those are for our department (ATOD): phd.leeds.ac.uk/funding/393-.... Please apply or circulate to those who may be interested!

Great rundown - Thank you for compiling this! The usethis::use_github() command was new for me. The last thing I would add is: when you are finished with your GitHub repo, and think it should be repro-ready, _always_ clone it and run it. See whether it runs (sometimes renv lockfile is incomplete).

If you missed my talk but still want to learn how to make your R code more reproducible, my slides are here 🙂: daxkellie.quarto.pub/will-your-co... All the links to packages and resources I mentioned are there, so hopefully this can be a nice reference, too! #ESAus2024 #rstats #quartopub 🧪🌏

Strong background in social psychology/behavioral science? Fresh ideas about public health messaging? Call for funded #PhD with me now live ⬇️

Promoting these cool PhD scholarship opportunities by the brand new UNRISK Centre for Doctoral Training: unrisk-cdt.ac.uk/projects/ We have a project proposal under review too, so fingers crossed, but there is already so much worth applying to on there!

RAG models have lots of awesome real-world applications. One I can think of is to build a database of grants and fellowships within your institution. Users (e.g., faculty and phd students) chat with a chatbot, which then provides the 10 most relevant funding opportunities in the database.

Bluesky isn't an echo chamber - it's an epistemic bubble: it excludes some voices by omission. It has poor coverage reliability. X/Twitter is more like an echo chamber: it doesn't exclude any voices, but nobody there treats voices they disagree with as credible. aeon.co/essays/why-i...

We've just made it much easier to reuse the data on Our World in Data. Here is an overview of our new features: enhanced data downloads and the Chart Data API. ourworldindata.org/easier-to-re...

Scientist recommends pseudoscience. In Nature. 🤔😱 Molecular biologist suggests “Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and DISC assessment are popular[…]starting points for […] providing insight into your behaviour patterns and decision-making style”: https://buff.ly/4fXqAnP

Intro: I’m a behavioural scientist, interested in impulsivity, self-control, and time preferences, especially in naturalistic contexts. I am currently working predominantly with Natural Language Processing tools to uncover how people make decisions in everyday life. #behaviouralscience

FAO anyone who uses or wants to use the Behavioural Science feed here, @svanbaal.bsky.social has now helpfully modified it so it also picks up #BehaviouralScience, #BehavioralScience, as well as those terms in standard text. See the description in the linked feed: bsky.app/profile/did:...

I think there is already a behavioral science feed 🙂 bsky.app/profile/did:...

NYT starter pack? NYT starter pack. bsky.app/starter-pack...

I made a @washingtonpost.com journalist: • starter pack (easy way to follow buncha people): bsky.app/starter-pack... • feed (lets you scroll through everyone at once): bsky.app/profile/drew...

I'm getting several requests for research assistant jobs (esp remote). I don't have anything at the moment. Are there people on here who are hiring/looking, or can point me towards a good aggregator - esp global?

Always nice when reminders tell you something new!

Criteria, waarderingen, gewichtsfactoren—dat is niet hoe we beslissen. Maar de slimme, snelle, pragmatische methode die we gebruiken is inadequaat wanneer de opties onaanvaardbaar zijn (zoals in zekere recente verkiezingen): Mijn @apache_be stukje: https://buff.ly/48Lq3D1

What a special surprise! Glad to report it’s totally legit and that I will be feeding the “less privilege” with the power of organization.

Does anybody have contacts at the Amazon Research team who I can talk to about using their reviews for a project?