Moral grandstanding (using moral & political discourse to gain social status) is associated with stronger affective polarization due to dichotomous thinking--seeing complex political issues in black-and-white terms. osf.io/preprints/ps... Moral grandstanding was also linked to civic engagement.

The widespread use of LLMs diminishes creative ideas. An analysis of over 2000 college essays finds that human-written essays contributed more new ideas than GPT-4 written essays www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Parameter- or prompt-modifications does not mitigate the creativity gap.

LLMs offer new opportunities for behavioural science, but their rapid evolution poses serious challenges. We published a reporting checklist to improve transparency, reproducibility and ethical accountability ofLLMresearch in the behavioural sciences www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Research by @steverathje.bsky.social et al finds people tend to prefer sycophantic AIs that reinforce prior beliefs, and increase certainty and extremity of attitudes, boost ‘better-than-average’ self-perception, and are seen as unbiased: buff.ly/MqspZUG HT coauthor @jayvanbavel.bsky.social

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

in chart form

Social media distort our perception of norms by highlighting extereme views, can subtly blind us to the ways that most people are moderate in their views. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looks like one to read and have my lab read. Distorting knowledge of social and expert consensus. This makes it harder to build real consensus and develop solutions. @maddyjalbert.bsky.social you might like this if you haven’t already seen it.

There is now a solid body of evidence showing that internet availability is causing a variety of outcomes that adversely affect democracy Algorithms are major culprits becase of their focus on maximizing user engagement with little regard for the quality of content. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Remote work has substantially increased social isolationwith consequences for mental health 1 in 14 remote workers spent a given workday with no human contact, and workers did not fill that void by socializing more outside of work hours. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Growing Republican mistrust in the healthcare system has widened health disparities between liberals and conservatives Anti-vaccination attitudes have led them to resist long-established vaccines for dangerous conditions such as measles. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Political identity drives choice of large language models—even when accuracy is incentivized. Participants (N=1,884) quickly developed preferences for AI systems that aligned with their political identities, and these preferences were stronger when models carried brand names. osf.io/preprints/so...

Want to Change Your Life? Become a Dad. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/o...

Is social media harmful? I discussed what social media and AI are doing to our relationships, wellbeing, and society with Jacki Nesi We also unpacked the polarized debates about social media, school bans, digital "detoxes", etc. Watch our full discussion here: open.substack.com/live-stream/...

#Misinformation is killing conservatives? Yep. Republican mistrust in healthcare widens health gap www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... @obrian.bsky.social: “Education is a pretty strong predictor of health.” @jayvanbavel.bsky.social: elevating "someone like RFK Jr" entrenches disparity problem.

Sycophantic AI makes human interaction feel more effortful & less satisfying! Over three weeks users became nearly as likely to seek personal advice from sycophantic AI as friends & family, and reported lower satisfaction with their real-world social interactions. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.079...

Why do people refuse to help others in distress? Young kids are often willing to help. But eventually they start developing excuses to avoid action. Only when they are given permission do they return to high levels of helping behavior. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/the-roots-...

Social sanctions sustain social order by reinforcing our values. But political polarization erodes this critical social process. With more polarization, allocations become less equitable because people (correctly) expect punishment even when acting fairly! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

SPSP supports this statement from APA CEO Dr. Arthur C. Evans, Jr. about proposed federal rules that would undermine peer review and restrict the topics that federal grants can support. Learn how scientists are advocating against these changes: at.apa.org/23dbf9

In this wide-ranging and deeply thought-provoking conversation, I discussed one of the most important—and often misunderstood—forces shaping organizations, workplaces, and society today: identity. If you want to understand why people act in groups: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

👋 Happening in 1 week: my data visualization seminar with @instats.bsky.social. If you or your students use Stata and want to up your graph game, this is designed for you. June 8 and 9, 10am-2pm Eastern. Link 👇

The order asks artificial intelligence companies to give the U.S. government 30 days to assess frontier models before they are released

Remember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...

Is AI created personalized echo chambers? I gave a talk today at the fantatistic NHH Norwegian School of Economics on a major limitation of AI. My talk was called "Inside AI Echo Chambers: How Sycophantic AI Increases Extremism and Overconfidence." Here is our paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Social media often functions like a funhouse mirror, amplifying the most extreme voices who dominate online discourse. As a result, people come to falsely believe those voices represent society and public opinion far more than they actually do: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Five Big Myths in Social Psychology—intuitively compelling results that aren’t quite what they seem, and widely misunderstood—debunked by @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and Dominic Packer: buff.ly/xxSTzv6

Social media is increasingly anti-social Only 7% of Instagram time & 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers. This is what happens when you condition algorithms on looking time rather than real social engagement.

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

Deadline Sunday! Our $2,500 Ctrl-Z Award recognizes scientists who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record. More details and nomination form here:

Honoured to share our new paper in @nature.com today. Across 12 countries in eastern and southern Africa and Southeast Asia, 1 in 6 internet-using children had experienced technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse. A thread 🧵

Social media often functions like a funhouse mirror, amplifying the most extreme voices who dominate online discourse. As a result, people come to falsely believe those voices represent society and public opinion far more than they actually do: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Life satisfaction is shaped by several stable factors: Emotional stability, extraversion & conscientiousness are highly correlated with life satisfaction Feeling misunderstood, unexcited, indecisive, envious, bored, used, & unable are linked with dissatisfaction psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

🧵 Public science in the US has taken some heavy hits over the last year, but the White House OMB is proposing a series of changes that will result in a TKO for science as we know it unless we fight back. Here's what's happening, and why it matters. 1/n

A new paper in Nature finds that engagement-based algorithms on social media amplifies intergroup, moralized and emotional (IME) information + toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, with the largest increases in moral outrage and political content. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is more evidence for the column I wrote for the Guardian last year arguing that a few extreme people were ruining the internet for the rest of us: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

An analysis of 370,000 college student essays found that human-written essays contain 8X more novel ideas than those generated by A.I! Though AI works often contain more flowery language, story lines are more homogeneous and lack distinctive ideas. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/o...

A handful of classic social psychology studies have seeped into pop culture—these studies have developed an almost mythological status in the field and in society. We debunked 5 of the biggests myths in the field in our recent newsletter: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...

this is what happens when you try to destroy scientific institutions.

"Much of this hostile content is driven by extreme users ... reduce(d) influence (...) improved the accuracy of social norm perceptions + reduce(...) perceptions of partisan animosity."

This is really important research. Extreme users are ruining social media for the rest of us. This presents a threat to platform success and you would think they would want to fix it as much as those of us who want to protect users from harm.

It's Fandom content alllll the way down because IME + toxic content is literally the bread and butter of Fandom engagement and interaction imo.

A new paper in Nature finds that engagement-based algorithms on social media amplifies intergroup, moralized and emotional (IME) information + toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, with the largest increases in moral outrage and political content. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A handful of classic social psychology studies have seeped into pop culture—these studies have developed an almost mythological status in the field and in society. We debunked 5 of the biggests myths in the field in our recent newsletter: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...

A survey of 2600 Ph.D. students, postdocs, and other researchers in 65 countries found that top three complaints were that supervisors: 1) used dismissive communication 2) provided little feedback 3) ignored team members’ well-being The main thing they wanted was empathy

An audit of 2.5 million academic papers identified 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references. The rate of fabrication in 2025 was more than 12 times greater than that in 2023! 28 clinical-trials & 79 systematic reviews contained fake references! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hey peeps going to APS in Barcelona! If you worry about misinformation, swing by my poster on Friday to hear what Laura Globig @steverathje.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and I have been up to in the past 2 years :) Bonus point: I have loads of recs for BCN food and sightseeing ;)

People often complain about tough peer reviews But papers that elicited stronger criticism from reviewers and required more-extensive revisions received more citations tha did papers that drew light comments and sailed through the peer-review process. 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-...

I think my favorite reality show is Love on the Spectrum. It portrays dating in a way that is more honest, humanizing, and empathic than every other reality show, and flies in the face of the vast majority of bitter, narrow-minded dating advice I see on social media. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/m...