Some day, OSF's integration into my workflows as the go-to repository for research data will be seamless. But not today.

Asked GPT to (impossibly) "write a Bluesky post 100% guaranteed to go viral" Its suggestion: "just saw a guy confidently order a "croissantini" at the coffee shop and the barista nodded like that was a normal word. i live in a simulation." Then I said "Make it more viral" and things got weird... 🧵

Some people bring up (1) the cost of criticism and (2) that a lot of criticism has already been voiced but ignored. Both points are valid, so here are some suggestion for (1) reducing backlash and (2) increasing impact (from this talk of mine: juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

Motto 2026

Excited to announce GOLLUM, an app that helps you focus on your most precious possession!

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We present the decisions-from-experience database (DfE-DB), including data from 168 studies. The data are currently shared with the original authors and made public upon publication. 🔗 Database: github.com/dwulff/dfe-db 🔗 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’m vocally skeptical of silicon samples, yet vocally impressed by SurveyBot3000. The difference: this does not rely on magic beans or assumed omniscience, it is trained and validated against a large corpus of highly relevant data and makes specific predictions with known accuracy and precision.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

See @jamiecummins.bsky.social 's work

thanks I hate it

Learned today that “Galápagos” comes from a Spanish word for tortoise, meaning that “Galápagos Tortoise” is, in fact, a tortology

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

Our new paper "Inconsistent outcome measurement in depression psychotherapy trials: A systematic historical and meta-analytic review over the past 50 years" led by @antoniasprenger.bsky.social is out now in JAD. 🧪 #PsychSciSky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

I made an error that I found thanks to @lukaswallrich.bsky.social. The code and preprint have been corrected/updated. Effects on false positive rates are smaller and only for alternative and correlation method but I think the overall argument still works.

people tend to confide in me so i've gotten a LOT of tea over the years from fellow phd students about their bosses/advisors. all the more grateful have such reports made me for having done my phd with ruben. see also my nonnormative evaluation the last time he advertised a job.

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

Works the other way around too. “If I was Jonathan Haidt, how would I destroy the next generation?”

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

Stroop effect

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...

Yes, like a Netflix documentary included IN EVERY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK

We love a good 'association as as fluid' metaphor, but this guy takes it to the next level. 12/10 for the reminder that conditioning on a collider doesn't just mess with your identification; it can also flood your basement.

There still seems to be a lot of confusion about significance testing in psych. No, p-values *don’t* become useless at large N. This flawed point also used to be framed as "too much power". But power isn't the problem – it's 1) unbalanced error rates and 2) the (lack of a) SESOI. 1/ >

New hobby: Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.

I built a DAG diagram with garden hoses for teaching. Pictured: a collider bias diagram, inspired by a blocked pipe situation I experienced (which I credit with giving me the intuition though it also ruined my belongings in the flooded cellar).

Major win for our field: finally a large, replicable effect.

🚨 New preprint and online tool 🚨 Thrilled to share new work, mapping the 🗺️ landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning using an 🤖 LLM-powered bibliometric approach. We built an online tool so you can explore the landscape yourself. Online tool: mpib.berlin/vFVqU Preprint: osf.io/6c2va_v1

My article "Data is not available upon request" was published in Meta-Psychology. Very happy to see this out! open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

Make an effect size prediction! @jamiecummins.bsky.social and I are replicating Balcetis & Dunning's (2010) "chocolate is more desirable than poop" (Cohen's d = 4.52) Let us known in the replies what effect size you think we'll find. Details of the study in the thread below.

Next up, @dirkwulff.bsky.social talks about conceptual clutter and jingle & jangle in psych #DPPD25

There are 90,000 measures in APA PsycTests, 43% of which are never referenced after initial publication. @bjoernhommel.bsky.social talks about how correlations between items and scales can be predicted by LLMs, which may help keep construct proliferation at bay.

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 🧵

If you're going to #DPPD25 next week and would like to learn more about LLMs in Behavioral Science: One spot for my Workshop "Introduction to Large Language Modeling" (Kassel, next Sunday) just opened up. dppd2025.de/programm/pre...

Another one of Stephan Schleim's critical account of biological psychiatry scilogs.spektrum.de/menschen-bil...

Unfortunately I just found out you can use Rayshader to make ggplots 3D. This won't become a timesink for me at all, nope, I won't get distracted by this

Key claim of trimodal response to SSRI in the STAR*D trial is not computationally reproducible www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Did you know there's a package to reformat code to meet the {tidyverse} style guide? {styler} is super useful for teaching students and helping them make their code more legible. It even has a drop down menu to do it with a point-and-click. styler.r-lib.org

Sustainability by numbers update on the carbon footprint of ChatGPT and Gemini! I really appreciated that @hannahritchie.bsky.social is following the developments (and also distinguishes between individual-level impact vs. AI/data centers as a whole).

I wrote an R package that creates standardized R project structures that are compliant with @mekline.bsky.social's psych-DS...ish. It also creates additional features for reproducibility and teaching like a readme, license, .gitignore and Quarto templates + can validate existing projects

they tried to explain mindfulness to me but i wasn’t paying attention

I disagree that it is a 'career strategy' at all. People are just science-ing. If you go into plumbing you can just plumb; you don't have to 'career.' But in science the culture may be one of careerism but not all humans connect with that. Some people like to just do good work.

Reflecting a little bit in the last while about the positions that folk opposing the points in our commentary will likely have. I worry that there will be a contingent of psychologists who will double-down when faced with evidence contradicting LLM’s usefulness for understanding human behaviour.

This title! “What happens to children’s mental health when we treat their parent’s depression? We have no idea. An empty systematic review.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our (@malte.the100.ci, @ianhussey.mmmdata.io) commentary "cognitive dissonance in large language models is neither cognitive nor dissonant" has just been accepted for publication at PNAS! Check out the thread below for a summary of our arguments. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exactly my first thought seeing d = 8: "No effect size shall exceed the preference for chocolate over poop"

conceptual replication in (some of) psychology more like - how can I hack the method of this study to obtain similar (significant) results

This is actually quite funny

The feeling when you stand next to your supervisor at your first conference.