One takeaway from our ongoing meta-analysis of meat reduction interventions: We need higher-quality evidence. We've included 451 effect sizes from 162 studies so far. Only one effect size came from a study with all 5 quality markers shown below. #EASP2026

HBS' latest filing in the Gino lawsuit contains a few new details: 1. A committee of 26 professors, admins, and fellows reviewed the allegations, and *unanimously concluded* that there was *clear and convincing evidence* of research misconduct.

New post is live! 40 years of race science arguments about brain size & the racial IQ gap, nobody bothered to write down the math or do anything beyond gawk at correlations. I did, walking through the data & formalizing it with the Lande equation. It fares worse than you could even imagine.

@keithpayne.bsky.social, @jimmycalanchini.bsky.social, Heidi Vuletich and I are co-editing a new Social Cognition special issue titled "10 Years of Bias of Crowds – Reflections and Future Directions". Deadline for letters of intent is July 15th. bit.ly/3R9e8KB

1/ Can AI help researchers check whether published social science results actually reproduce? In our new PNAS paper, we tested this directly in the AI Replication Games: 288 researchers, 103 teams, and real replication packages from quantitative social science.

Why do humans punish? Our new paper, with @manvir.bsky.social, is out in Psychological Science! With experiments in a small-scale society (Mentawai) & the US, we test whether punitive cognition evolved to deter wrongdoing or restore fairness. link: tinyurl.com/msrmu7cc pdf: tinyurl.com/mvprz8fb

Excellent news! Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which they publish! A great result by all those proposing this strong solution to publication bias and selective reporting (and getting expert feedback before data collection)! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you compare people's life satisfaction to their retrospective judgments, it suggests that happiness is not declining. Instead, our expectations are changing with aggregate improvements so our relative satisfaction is rescaled for current circumstances www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Collabra: Psychology, the official journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, seeks applications for Editor-in-Chief! The SIPS Publications Committee encourages editors with innovative ideas about how Collabra: Psychology can best accomplish its mission to apply.

Two new facts stand out: 1. 85% of hallucinated citations in preprints are also in the subsequent journal version (thanks, peer review!) 2. Fake cites more likely to use the names of (male) scholars who are already highly cited, creating a fake-citation Matthew effect. arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

What determines the morality of harming another creature—eg a farm animal, or a foetus? In the West, this judgment relies more on sentience than on agency, and research by @bxjaeger.bsky.social& Bosten finds it generalizes across six cultures: buff.ly/4intBok HT @xphilosopher.bsky.social

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Disease cues and social avoidance Study how sensory disease cues shape social avoidance 🙅 and immune responses 🩸 using VR 🎮, laboratory experiments, and psychophysiological methods. ⏳ Start: Oct 2026 | ⚠️ Deadline: May 17 📍 CNRS / University of Montpellier 🇫🇷 → emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto...

🤢 Disgust, food avoidance, & immunity Study how disgust shapes food avoidance 🙅 & immune responses 🩸 using VR 🎮, laboratory experiments, and psychophysiological methods. With @csarabian.bsky.social & me ⏳ Start: Oct 2026 | Deadline: May 20 📍 Univ. Montpellier 🇫🇷 → euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/422430

New in AMPPS, led by Adeyemi Adetula: "The Evaluation of Harm and Purity Transgressions in Africans: A Paradigmatic Replication of Rottman and Young (2019)" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... We attempted to replicate a moral psychology finding in 1,320 participants from 12 African sites 1/

Although a tiny group of people are spreading misinformation, it is impacting the beliefs of a wide swath of the population. Over 70% of people believe at least one of these false or unproven health claims: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Just spreading the word about an opportunity to nominate or be nominated for Editor-in-Chief of SPPS, beginning next year. I'm chairing the panel so feel free to ask about it! Deadline 30 June 2026. www.easp.eu/news/itm/nom...

New preprint: Preregistration is supposed to make research more transparent. But if registry records aren't kept up to date, the transparency benefit erodes. We checked 1,137 psych meta-analyses on PROSPERO and found the records are systematically out of sync with reality osf.io/preprints/ps...

So we emailed the authors of all 358 unpublished registrations. 80 wrote responded. The reasons they gave were almost entirely logistical: no time (47%), people leaving the project (11%), no funding (7%). Only one person cited non-significant results as a reason for not publishing.

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...

How do people decide whether it’s wrong to harm a pig? A chimp? A baby? In the West, these judgments are based more on *experience* (being able to feel) than on *agency* (being able to think and act) New study finds that same pattern across other cultures journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Proud of this paper; five years in the making. Correcting consumer beliefs about carbon impact of meat products (controlling for salience and social norms) does *not* lead to any change in consumption behavior in our setting. Any effects of carbon labels are likely to work through salience/norms.

🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨 ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts. internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/

The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices. Take a read: www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

The *majority* of philosophy papers now cite at least some empirical data. Papers that do purely a priori philosophy are in a minority

New paper out in @irsp-rips.bsky.social We tested three claims about how individual differences shape impression formation. rips-irsp.com/articles/10....

Should we use error checking tools like Statcheck and GRIM to automatically check for errors in studies in meta-analyses? I wrote a blog post with some insights from a hackathon where we scrutinized this idea. metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/3/...

Now published in Psych Science: doi.org/10.1177/0956... We explored cultural differences in how people across six different countries attribute moral standing.

A threat to many fields of research wanting to conduct longitudinal evaluations is participants may remember their previous answers. Retest reliability, memory accuracy, long-term effects of interventions. We instead show people don't remember what they last said. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psych

I wrote a blog for the Meta-Research Center expressing my infinite frustration about not getting data. What else is new, you might think? Well, I added an extra layer of annoyance directed at the journals who do NOTHING to enforce promised data sharing. metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/2/...

Researchers often present participants with stimuli that are assumed to reliably and exclusively evoke one, and only one, emotion category. This study shows that this is rarely the case for some widely used stimuli. doi.org/10.1037/emo0...

1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...

It's a beautiful plot, but it's terribly misleading about the impact of pre-registration. More recent studies (with higher sample sizes) find very little impact of pre-registration on the publication of null results. Here's a thread with some references (1/N)

Registered report (with 885 US MTurkers) finds no evidence for the claim that people with higher chronic loneliness have a stronger tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman objects @giladfeldman.bsky.social doi.org/10.1037/cns0...

8.0% of citations in the medical literature contain major errors. E.g., the cited work makes the opposite claim or is unrelated to the claim in the citing article.

Using randomly assigned identities, ppl were more likely to accept identity-congruent misinformation despite equal knowledge, supporting identity-protective motivated reasoning as a key driver of misinformation acceptance. #EvPsych #cogpsyc #SocialPsyc #polipsy journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

New paper out: Some people are systematically better at judging others’ intelligence. Who are the best judges? People WHO are intelligent themselves, have good emotion-perception ability, and who are high in well-being. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I built a basic shiny app to check doi's (with help of LLM, Claude Opus). The use case is for when students submit work with fabricated references (I used to randomly check, this will systematically check). Note it comes with no warranties,... . tvpollet.github.io/2026-01-30-D...

Out now and open access for four weeks as the editor's choice Topic in Focus in American Psychologist. Contrary to popular belief, evolutionary psychology hypotheses are testable and falsifiable. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

📣Revised preprint by @cas-goos.bsky.social Measurement reliability, validity, and reporting in psychology still has a long way to go... We compared original studies w replications, and where possible recalculated reliability & unidimensionality. Some findings > osf.io/preprints/ps...

People think that non-human animals have thoughts and feelings, but not in the same way that humans do. In a large sample of children & adolescents (n > 1k) from 15 countries, results looked very similar across countries and age groups. doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

I hate this: "The Editors have retracted this article... the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) instrument was used without proper permissions" link.springer.com/article/10.1... The MMSE is a series of 11 simple questions. A perfectly good paper is retracted because you can copyright 11 questions

Large, cross-cultural study (n > 6k, 25 nations) on international prosociality finds that - ingroup favoritism is widespread - more similarities between two nations = more prosociality - people from rich nations give more to people from poor nations doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

"Children between the ages of 4 to 11 years traded off their moral concern for other species against the cultural importance of human food practices." journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Some people consistently restrict their prosociality to a narrow group of individuals, whereas others extend it to a wider range of groups. Restricted prosociality was most strongly correlated with traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. doi.org/10.1037/pspp...

How many versions of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) exist? And how much does this affect research using the IGT? More than you might think. 🧵

The Iowa Gambling Task is an extreme example of Jingle Fallacy and schmeasurement. In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99. At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.