Big news at the META/e conference: metacheck, a promising tool for automatically extracting information from scientific manuscripts is beta-launched today. Has the potential to massively increase the efficiency of meta-science projects. www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/

A game of whack-a-mole with methodological confounds. We saw the same thing in the Botox-for-depression lit Improvements in attractiveness only matter in Study 1. Expectancies only matter in Study 2. Inability for women to express nonverbal disapproval only matters in Study 3, etc. 🙈

New estimate for residual bias after study registration just dropped

What riles me up about “people tried to shut down PP research” is that Cuddy’s own coauthor-turned-critic Carney guest-edited a whole special issue of Registered Reports on Power Posing (incl a meta-analysis), which shows strong evidence against PP even though most authors clearly weren’t sceptics.

Hehehehe

New blog post! Let's say an effect you are interested in varies between countries and you want to explain some of that cross-cultural variation. What could possibly go wrong? www.the100.ci/2026/05/20/f...

📣 Volunteer position alert 📣 At PYMS, we are looking for a new Board Member! Are you an ECR with a passion for meta-science? Do you want to help organize events for fellow meta-scientists and help grow PYMS over the coming years? Check out the open position of Board Member!

Sometimes co-authors ask me “did you see what they cited us for???” and of course I didn’t, because if you want to keep faith in humanity, you don’t look up what people cite you for, just like you don’t read comment sections.

Klaus Fiedler passed away two days ago. joachimfunke.de/2026/05/13/n... In 2017 we did a fun interview for In Mind on the replication crisis. www.in-mind.org/blog/post/we... We didn't agree on everything, but I greatly respect he took on the role of Devil's Advocate as a scientific principle.

Are you interested in Shaping an Open Science Culture? Apply for this 2 year post-doc position at UMC Amsterdam. Joeri Tijdink is the PI, but you will work in a large interdisciplinary team (including me). werkenbij.amsterdamumc.org/en/vacatures...

I also created a version of the 'guess the correlation' game. Students always enjoyed it, but the original website (with fun retro design) started to require a google account login. So I created my own version. Play it here: lakens.github.io/statistical_...

From now on, I'm going to write papers where I take an arbitrary performance metric, restrict the sample to top performers on that metric, and then hunt for negative correlations with everything else in the truncated sample. I'm at a business school, so this should be extremely lucrative.

Some research fields have a type of paper that basically asks: "What if a more expensive but less reliable machine can do [this] instead?"

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

Good news everyone 🥳 Our (w @vincentab.bsky.social) primer on models as prediction machines (with the marginaleffects package) is finally officially published!> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The first session of our Online Presentations week will be today at 12:00 (CEST) Today, @karolinehuth.bsky.social will present on the need for reporting standards in methodological research, and Noam Tal-Perry will present on team compositions of research teams Join forms.office.com/e/MkjYWqTvAw

I’m hiring a PhD student! The candidate will work alongside @zefreeman.bsky.social, who is joining our research group as postdoc. jobs.unibe.ch/job-vacancie...

New post on The 100% CI: Science needs downvotes. www.the100.ci/2026/04/13/s... In which I make the case that grant funders should add funding lines that include a module for bug bounties.

We had a 'data forensics' lab meeting yesterday. We investigated everyone's close-to-submission datasets under the (false) assumption the data was faked & we had to find proof 🔍🧐 We found some mistakes & weirdnesses and it was such a good exercise in good data management! Highly recommend!

This is a good reminder that following the demise of bookdown.org, all of my ebooks are now hosted by quarto.pub. You can find the new links here: bsky.app/profile/solo...

“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...

Any sufficiently advanced file-drawer is indistinguishable from p-hacking

Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL. We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/

New post from me on The 100% CI. Think inside the box, part 1: The guy Euclidean distance told you not to worry about www.the100.ci/2026/03/09/t...

Oh, to publish in a Nature brand journal about how *checks notes* the big math changes to small math.

Curious about how psychological theories are built, tested, and refined in practice? This summer, the Theory Methods Society is launching the very first edition of the summer school Theory Building in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (July 6–10, 2026). theorymethodssociety.org

If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

bro just one more future study bro, bro I swear just one more future study and it'll fix the inference bro

One funny effect of pretending that methodological issues can just be ignored because of “future studies” is that it probably prevents those future studies from happening. Like why bother actually addressing hard issues when you can just get away with hand waving?

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities. This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

"40% of papers about subarachnoid haemorrhage in animals contained manipulated images." We have to face up to the fact that in some fields, over half of published science might be fake.

“Donation after circulatory death donors rose from 118 in 2000 (2% of all donors) to 8129 in 2025 (49%).” Figures are for the US.

The number of organs available for donation has risen massively in the past five years. It seems to be the result of technological advances in preserving organs after circulatory death. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

The only feature I miss in Signal compared to WhatsApp was transcription of voice messages. So, I had Claude code a pipeline to do this locally on Mac using sigtop+ffmpeg+whisper at the click of a button. github.com/rubenarslan/...

New newspaper headline for your Intro to Causal Inference lecture just dropped

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

After learning about collider bias, reading this gave me the second-worst existential crisis about learning anything causal from data *even when you can run experiments*. Really a must-read if you’re not already familiar with this stuff.

Per protocol analysis strikes again! Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

Always different journals, I should add. Makes me think about @ruben.the100.ci's blog post about a major bug of peer review: www.the100.ci/2020/06/24/m...

We regret to inform you that your paper cannot be considered for publication, but we encourage you to submit it to our GOLD Open Access sister journal

Call for Submissions for the Theory Methods Conference 2026, September 30-October 2! theorymethodssociety.org/conference.h... We invite you to: 1) Submit your proposal: edu.nl/mj9x6 2) Invite your colleagues/lab/(PhD) students, and encourage them to submit 3) Share this post

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is particularly weird because most of Open Science boils down to: just be honest. Write down in your paper what you actually did. Seems a rather low bar for any science, but apparently pointing this out touches upon a very sensitive issue for some fellow academics.

Since 2020, TOP Factor has helped researchers understand how journals support open practices. On March 16, 2026, COS will be sunsetting the tool. Read more about what prompted the decision, what we've learned, and the future of open and transparent policymaking: www.cos.io/blog/sunsett...

I'm still on the lookout for this, although I've had some leads. My understanding so far is that this hasn't been studied, or written about, from an economic perspective yet.

It's harder to understand reality than we intuitively think

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem! In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference. www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...