My hot take is that in the era of easily-generated AI nonsense papers journals that want to ensure high quality will need to start hiring full-time professional editors and reviewers instead of relying on volunteer labor from overworked academics.

It's easy to see shoddy research as a bad actor problem. But if AI slop like this can make it through editors and peer reviewers, it means there are systemic problems at work. And I'd argue that at least part of the problem is the overwork culture in academia-- pressure to do more while caring less.

"Prestige bias" is one of the strongest forms of bias in academia. Reviewers rank paper submissions from top-20 institutions and non-students higher, but this goes away with blinded reviews. haruka-uchida.github.io/websitefiles...

Even the the damn twitter card for this Nature Scientific Reports is clearly AI Slop.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Stop submitting AI slop to journals and preprint servers This is anti-social behavior. It is making life harder for everyone involved except for the person submitting the slop

METRICS is accepting applications for the 2026–27 postdoctoral fellowship in meta-research at Stanford. Deadline: Feb 15, 2026. Start date will be around Oct 1, 2026 (+/- 2 month flexibility). See: metrics.stanford.edu/postdoctoral... #MetaResearch #postdoc

“The articles in AMPPS offer, month in and month out, the invitation to practice aligning your values, intentions, and actions to do less scientific harm and reach for the methodological ceiling” Grateful to @dsbarra.bsky.social for continuing what @profsimons.bsky.social & co started at AMPPS!

🚨 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

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS. Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Students applying for grad school, or reaching out to professors. I have an important piece of advice for you: STOP DOING THIS 👇 (a thread) #STEM #PhD #gradschool #academictips

ZPID Trier: Junior professorship (W1-equivalent) Psychological Metascience (with tenure-track to W2 LBesG-equivalent) (f/m/d) leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/job/10kku5n7 #Stellenangebot

Social psych friends, please help me out with a class discussion by responding to the following (and sharing): What do you see as the biggest challenge for social and personality psychology in the immediate future? What should we as a field be doing better than we are now?

📊New research finds that Americans widely support institutions and policies designed to provide political representation for future generations, though they often underestimate the support of their peers for these initiatives. Read more in #PSPB: ow.ly/Ml6z50Xw1OX

I mentioned this approach to a colleague who does research on the use of AI in education. She replied, “Guess what some students do in this situation. They prompt ChatGPT to write a report on the subject and an accompanying report explaining how and why the first report is wrong.”

I think it's hard to overstate how much Simine has changed research practices and standards in psychology for the better, despite at times massive resistance from powerful parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Very well deserved award imho 🥳

🏆 Individual: @simine.com, psychologist at @unimelb.bsky.social & editor-in-chief of Psychological Science, is recognized for pioneering methodological rigor, reproducibility & collaborative research, driving initiatives such as @improvingpsych.org & the journal Collabra @ucpress.bsky.social. (2/5)

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

5 years ago, I wrote about doing Christmas but not Santa with my kids. The gist is that Santa-fied Christmas doesn't sit well with me for a few reasons, including because of how lies can undermine kids' trust in their parents. Well, funny story about that... 1/🧵 www.theatlantic.com/family/archi...

Horrific use of psychological testing, up there with the 20th century's worst practices: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

All the ways the next generation gives me a lot of hope. A thread/

My wife was sexually harassed by Miles Hewstone as a phd student. He was still asked to review her (and other women he harassed) for jobs and promotions. This is so fucked up. Thankfully, she and many other women testified against him and something was finally done. This is her take on his case:

I'm excited to share that I’ll be reviewing PhD applications this cycle for students interested in working with me starting Summer/Fall 2026. I’m especially looking for applicants excited about research on trust/persuasion, responses to historical harm, addressing inequality, and/or mindsets.

We spent a year investigating billionaires for @washingtonpost.com. We found: the wealthiest 100 Americans gave $1.1 billion to influence the 2024 elections — 140x more than they did in 2000. And almost all of that giving boosted Republicans. washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

New paper with @jzberman.bsky.social finally out!

Problem is: Neither our work culture nor our education culture incentivizes deep learning. Instead, we're incentivized to economize--to learn only what's needed to finish the task or get the answer right on the test. So, people use ChatGPT, even when they know they could learn more by other means.

Man, I hadn't thought about this as a consequence of LLM use. The first "theory of everything" I ever received was in grad school and I suspect it was probably because I was early in the alphabet at MIT. That one didn't strike me as reflecting any particularly disordered thinking... <1/n> 🧵

There is something intensely bleak about students using gAI in an assignment asking them to respond to a text about enslaved people--so sad. Students are being misled into stripping themselves of the ability to read, write, think by our own universities and Big Tech www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

🚨🚨 NEW Assistant professor position at Northeastern! Do you study sound/language/music + brain + health? Apply! We're so excited to add a new faculty member to our community! Please post widely, we begin reviewing apps Dec 15! northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

How do we make sense of scientific literature that is growing explosively to the point where no-one could read all the relevant papers, and is contaminated with fraudulent and LLM-generated papers? I think that science isn't currently equipped to deal with this, and we need to. #science #metascience

Job posting alert! Open Science Specialist at the University of Calgary (in Canada!) #job #OpenScience careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1704502...

Humans are bad at big numbers. Which makes it easier for billionaires (and trillionaires) to get away with hoarding wealth. Because most people just can't comprehend how much money that is. So, I appreciate this WaPo effort to help people visualize what ridiculous amounts of wealth really mean.

NSF is open again! A few comments: *Please be patient. During a shutdown NSF employees cannot open computers or respond to emails. *Merit review will continue. However panels won’t resume until after Dec 8th. *POs remain excited and committed to advancing science and the scientific workforce.

Reminder: The submission deadline for ECP22 is December 7th. www.ecp22edinburgh.org/submission

Human brains produce new ideas every second of every day. Sit down with a tiny child and ask them to explain something they're doing and you will hear half a dozen of them. Ideas are what humans *do*. The idea is by far the easiest part of any creative process.

i’m laughing but honestly it’s sad how much the government is pushing this largely useless and materially harmful technology in the false hope it delivers productivity benefits. mark carney wants companies to adopt generative AI, but only 2% are seeing a return on investment. this cannot last.

I'd really want to know about the guardrails being implemented here, given our recent results in @nature.com showing that people are likely to ask LLMs to help them cheat with taxes, and that LLMs are likely to accept www.nature.com/articles/s41...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

the idea is not all that counts. the idea is nothing at all until it has been lassooed, corralled, mutated, shuffled, blended with other ideas, and then expressed over the medium of however many thousand words that you have selected and arranged as best you can. the idea is a promise, not a book.

Oh tragic irony: online research made LLMs possible, LLMs kill online research

Very clear illustration of the different effects of alternative visualiaations of the same data www.nature.com/articles/s44...

POSTDOC POSITION in social psychology at Cornell @cornellpsych.bsky.social! We will begin reviewing apps Dec 1st. Please repost! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31185 @spspnews.bsky.social @spspsc.bsky.social @aplssc.bsky.social @spssi.bsky.social @psychscience.bsky.social

Wow - hating on Elsevier makes mainstream news in New Zealand! www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

New research explores why openness/intellect stands apart from other personality traits. It turns out this trait may be less universal across cultures and rarely targeted for change. Read more in #PSPR: ow.ly/UGlJ50XqLqS

If you’re an author, reviewer, or editor and want to learn about Registered Reports from one of the best editors around, go to this webinar! Nov 19th at 8am Pacific US, 11am Eastern US, 5pm Central Europe (3am Nov 20th for the diehard Australians)

I’m thrilled to share that our paper is now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General!🧵👇 psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Three preregistered experiments with prolific participants (N = 2,254) found no evidence for experimenter demand effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

The race to churn out papers is a systemic problem. Early career scholars are desperate to get more papers to compete in the academic job market. This can make it hard for faculty mentors hard to reduce their output unless they shrink their lab (which removes opportunities from next generation).

absolutely. which is why this was the definition for AI that @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I included in our recent TiCS article