Here's the third of the Otago lectures, this one on the peer review system and why it's becoming increasingly difficult to find reviewers.

Here's another of the University of Otago lectures for anyone who might be interested. This one is a more general, almost public lecture about how digital information technologies are changing the way we make sense of the world. /Friends in Aotearoa, I miss you all so badly.

New interview on Radio NZ about how and why humans evolved to make music (spoiler alert: I believe it’s primarily for social bonding) www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

Grade inflation is a collective action problem—each professor is individually published for providing challenging material and grading with integrity unless we fix the system. This burden falls heaviest on contract faculty who are renewed or fired based on course evaluations.

Within-participants designs need 2-8x fewer participants than between-participants designs for the same level of precision. Ch 9 of Experimentology argues for making within your default. 🧵 experimentology.io

Proprietary LLMs impede scientific transparency and reproducibility Comment by Killian L. McLoughlin, Alexis Palmer, J. Nathan Matias & M. J. Crockett Web: go.nature.com/4wDYqGI PDF: rdcu.be/ftzkM

Happy to share our new preprint exploring the everyday social ecology of preschoolers! We applied an automated multimodal pipeline to 267 hours of naturalistic egocentric video from 107 children (ages 3–5) to capture the changing natural statistics of everyday interactions: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Last February, I visited Trish Priest and her colleagues at Otago and gave a few lectures. In this one, I present an overview of the course that @jevinwest.bsky.social and I developed for colleague students about how to live, learn, work, and thrive in an AI world.

"avoidance of social harassment" or "aggressive and sexual attention" "appears to underlie this" phenomenon of some female hummingbirds having male plumage. Fascinating! A bit like some humans, e.g. George Sand, represented as male to, in part, avoid harassment and unwanted attention.

Our department just announced a new Associate Professor position in quantitative research methodology 🇳🇴 One of the favorable qualifications is experience with open science practices + R/Python experience www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

inspired by @russpoldrack.org's AI policy for his lab, last night I drafted up this AI policy and came up with an initial set of use case suggestions for my lab

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Interested in doing a postdoc with me in Auckland, New Zealand? 🇳🇿 See info below on a competitive award opportunity, and please spread the word!

We should pay peer reviewers Paying reviewers led to faster decisions—an average of 5.5 working days vs 38 days for unpaid reviews And review quality improved (judged by handling editors) Reviewers who delivered a good peer review in 4 days were paid $290 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A great article from @peterkdearden.bsky.social on extinction, why #conservation matters, and the role of #genomics. #kakapo open.substack.com/pub/peterkde...

Boy this was a long road, but glad it's finally out! @dgrand.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social @arechar.bsky.social (along with Michael N. Stagnaro, James N. Druckman, not tagable)

🚨 Now out in PNAS In decision research, "talk is cheap." We show it isn't. Using LLMs to analyze participants' free-text explanations of their choices, we find verbal reports are a rich, scalable window into how people actually decide. 🔗 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led by Kamil Fulawka

In dyadic daily life research, partners may report on different “shared” events. Our new Feature Focus blog shows a diary workflow that anchors both partners’ reports to the same real-life interaction. 💬 Couples 👨‍👩‍👧 Families 🛋️ Therapy 🤝 Other dyads Check out the blog: m-path.io/blog/how-to-...

If you have (or will soon) complete your PhD & would like to join a thriving cultural evolution research group in NEW ZEALAND, drop me a line. UoA offers a handful of funded research fellowships. Applications must be made by a faculty member. Deadline August. Pls share with your students

Immigration... Good for productivity. And not at the cost of locals' jobs. (Lottery design *chef's kiss*)

New JPSP registered report + coordinated data analysis led by Tiko Yoneda: identical models across 11 aging cohorts (N=175,070; 18 countries). Loneliness—not simply social isolation—was more robustly associated with cognitive impairment and mortality risk psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

This is Vinnie. He just got a new splish splash pad and literally can't contain his excitement. Thinks this is going to be the best summer ever. 13/10 (FB: Claudia Carr)

Five academic psychology jobs available here in Oz (not in my university) Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor - Perception external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/54... Lecturer/Senior Lecturer – Statistics external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/54...

Now out in Child Dev: "If moms do it, it can't be that important: Children's reasoning about gender disparities in domestic work" academic.oup.com/chidev/advan... Kids' awareness that moms do most housework + their intrinsic explanations for this jointly predict their devaluing domestic work 🧵

I‘d like to respectfully suggest a reframing. Storytelling isn’t quite the right metaphor. Science communication is grounded in ideas about how scientific progress happens and how it gets stuck. That’s the “story” equivalent: Framing what you are doing in terms of .…

I was lucky to spend the last 5 months working at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. A wonderful experience of finding community and experiences of interdisciplinary surprise and curiosity. The have open calls for applications at all career stages. I highly recommend

🧵 New paper out in JPSP: Morality Cut Both Ways. Can reading facts make you moralize an issue — or lose a moral conviction? We ran 6 studies, 4,464 participants. The results were surprising. 👇 #MoralPsychology #Attitudes. @icedteas.bsky.social 1/8

Teaching people about social identity, group dynamics, and intergroup relations is more important than ever. Students are living through an era of intense polarization, online conflict, generational divides, and eroding trust in institutions. We updated our syllabus & teaching materials:

Some new work on AI & science: A reporting checklist for LLMs in behavioral science Thanks to @sfeuerriegel.bsky.social for spearheading. As LLMs become more common in research, transparency is essential. We developed a reporting checklist for reporting how LLMs were used - please share! 1/4

It's always a good day to learn about equivalence testing - happy (US) Father's Day! @lakens.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

This bonkers claim is sufficient on its own to conclude that the work is not real.

We are social creatures, hard-wired to give attention to people when we’re in conversation with them. If the person isn’t present, we use some of our mental energy putting ourselves in their place. Doing this while driving is about as bad for attentiveness & reaction time as being a little bit drunk

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

Delighted to share some good news 🧪 “This hugely encouraging news shows the life-saving impact of the HPV vaccine, and it’s incredibly exciting to be able to say to this whole generation: cervical cancer shouldn’t be a risk for you,” says Caroline Temmink www.newscientist.com/article/2530...

Kumara approves of our move to New Zealand 🥰 He’s surprisingly well-adjusted after a long flight and 10 days of quarantine and is already enjoying lots of fun bush and beach walks!

Our review on #speciesism is now out in Nature Reviews Psychology. rdcu.be/foTDx We synthesise research on how people think about animals, morally rank species, and justify animal exploitation and consumption. A pleasure to work on this with @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social @springernature.com

Apropos of nothing, anyone interested in joining a "software* in social/personality psychology"-themed SPSP submission? *could be R/python packages, dashboards, web-based or mobile apps, etc.,

Have you seen MATILDA (matilda.fss.uu.nl)? Which stands for Measurement, Analysis & Theory for Intensive Longitudinal Data. MATILDA is a website with educational articles that help researchers align theory, measurement, and analysis when studying processes using intensive longitudinal data.

If you ever feel this way about a professor, please tell them. 🙏🏼 This single email just recharged my professional battery more than any grant or promotion ever could. 💙

The cuts to science in the US are decimating the talent pipeline and leading to a brain drain. A survey of biomedical scientists found that only half now say they are likely to remain in academia, down 22 percentage points from how they felt 6 months earlier.

The paper "The Bots Ruining Social Science Are Not Bots at All" by Jaffe et al. got a lot of attention when it came out in Perspectives on Psychological Science. We read it in our journal club and have a few comments that we now posted to PubPeer pubpeer.com/publications...

New team science initiative just dropped! manyscale.org We're looking for collaborators to lead repositories of self-report measures in their own psychology subfields.

My latest for @nature.com looks at the challenge researchers are facing thanks to bots scraping their data uploaded alongside their research - and what they think ought to be done about it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I finally got a tour of the legendary "Stanford Prison Experiment", courtesy of @robbwiller.bsky.social Our reanalysis of the study changed our understanding of the social psychology involved in the Prison Experiment. We wrote about it in our newsletter: powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...

There is a position for a Postdoc (3+3 years) in my lab. If you are interested in studying goals, self-regulation, self-control, motivation, personality, well-being, personality development, and/or intra-individual variability with me, here is more information jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/0...

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

in booking meetings for later in 2026, today i learned: (1) BC is making daylight savings permanent this fall, such that Vancouver is on PDT forever (while the rest of the west coast moves to PST in Nov) (2) not all calendar software is aware of this yet. there's gonna be many missed meetings lol

remember when Google offered unlimited digital storage to colleges and universities and then when adoption reached the right levels rescinded that promise, capped everything, and started pricing those services without the subsidies? idk man just something I think about a lot

This paper has now been accepted at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science!