"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.

We hope to not just talk about the problem, but also build tools using LLMs to reduce confusion, clarify relationships in this messy pedigree and hopefully help us communicate better. Some preliminary work is here: rr.peercommunityin.org/PCIRegistere... and the DFG recently funded us to follow up.

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising). We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out. osf.io/preprints/ps...

As somebody who is involved in science reform outside of the US, it seems a bit much to plan for a scenario in which the most important democracy of the world elects an autocrat that is completely detached from reality.>

Join me at the University of Witten/Herdecke for research on meta scientific topics, replication work or other fun things :-) as well as teaching some IMO wonderful students short.sg/j/56902143

We will be hosting a virtual symposium on "AI/LLMs for detecting scientific errors" as part of the Metascience Conference next Tuesday (June 17th) from 6:30 to 7:30 pm CEST. Participation is free. Further information and registration: metascience.info/virtual-symp...

The following article has been retracted on the basis of my @pubpeer.com comments. Zemestani & Mozaffari (2020) “Acceptance and commitment therapy for the treatment of depression in persons with physical disability: a randomized controlled trial” journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I generally recommend people to compare themselves to their past selves (i.e., have mastery goals). But if you *must* compare yourself to others, do it well and enter resources, social support, and random luck as covariates in your model.

Save the date for the 8th Perspectives on Scientific Error conference on 11, 12, and 13 Februari 2026 in Leiden, the Netherlands. perspectivesonscientificerror2026.wordpress.com This is an event not to miss, bringing together philosophers, statisticians, and metascientists.

hurrah! a new preprint*! weee have DAGs! we have Total Survey Error**! WE have MrP (rebranded as RPP)! We have cool plots showing how even high quality random samples can benefit from a good weighting model! What else do you want?! With @ianhussey.bsky.social, @malte.the100.ci, & @ruben.the100.ci

Have you every found yourself wondering whether the most widely used measures of social cognitive ability measure what they are supposed to measure?

The jingle-jangle problem is getting out of control

Happy Large Enough N day for those who observe

🚀Very excited to finally see our paper on nonsignificance misinterpretations published! 📈 Together, @smurphee.bsky.social, Aurelio Fernández, Linda Reimann and I investigated the prevalence of "p > .05 = absence of an effect" interpretations. (1/4) doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

ruben pros: - nice - considerate of your personal circumstances - knows most things worth knowing or will tell you how to discover the things yourself - timely and useful feedback - no micromanagement ruben cons: - won't allow you to use the word "yeet" in papers - tall

With 300 mL of coffee, you don’t need randomization.

what if data cleaning, but too much www.the100.ci/2025/02/18/c...

The first Swiss edition of Perspectives on Scientific Error kicking off very Swissly indeed #PSE7