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.

Whose job is it to solve climate change? This study asked Dutch residents and political and business representatives and they mostly agreed on the answer. It's mostly the others' responsibility 🙃 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Social media research has a conflict of interest problem: “these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque” A real concern is that this may incentivize scholars to minimize the harms of social media platforms arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11507

The kids are alright statsandsociety.substack.com/p/how-bad-is...

Images of familiar faces generated with Chat-GPT and DALLE are indistinguishable from real photographs link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🌟 Call for Session Proposals 🌟 Don’t miss your chance to shape the agenda for #SIPS2026! Propose: ✨workshop, ✨hackathon, ✨unconference, ✨lightning talk, ✨roundtables. Submission Deadlines: 🔹 In-Person (Washington, DC, USA): Jan 23, 2026 🔹 Online: Feb 27, 2026 Details:

Our machine learning competition on forecasting depression is online! We'd love for as many people as possible to participate. Please share in your respective networks — thank you :). www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/announcement...

This NHB article that a I4R fellow reproduced is now retracted and a matters arising has been published. See this thread for more information: bsky.app/profile/jack...

Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: Dietvorst, B. J. (in press). Understanding people's preferences for predictions: People prioritize being right over minimizing how wrong they are in expectation. Management Science. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc...

Maybe a contender for the next round of the Ig Nobel? People in Chicago noticed a hole in the pavement where a rat had fallen into the wet concrete. Scientists summoned all their um, actually energy, ran some analyses, and showed that it was most likely a squirrel. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Interesting megastudy on the (in)effectiveness of climate messaging: tiny effects on attitudes, no effects on donation www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Persuasiveness varied little across party lines", another win for Persuasion in Parallel @aecoppock.bsky.social

AMPPS recently accepted a new paper "Registered Replication Report: Johns, Schmader, & Martens (2005)" on stereotype threat (osf.io/preprints/ps...); full paper is forthcoming on our website). AMPPS is now soliciting Commentary articles on this paper. @psychscience.bsky.social /cont

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky Also... Americans consider Psychology among most interesting disciplines to study! (Explains why psych depts have healthy numbers at most unis)

Partisans differ in economic perceptions based on who is president, even if you pay them to get correct answers: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Join our Replicability Project: Health Behavior! We have 55 replication studies underway, our target is 65-70. We are only recruiting for secondary data replications--i.e., using existing data to test the original question. Here's a list of studies we think could be feasible. If interested...

Many common practices in US animal agriculture (cutting off chickens' beaks or castrating calves without pain relief) are seen as unacceptable by the US public. @faunalytics.bsky.social An earlier study in the UK found very similar results. faunalytics.org/public-accep...

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

🚀 Announcing the Besample Dissertation Grant (N=3,000) If you’re a Ph.D. student in psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication, or any related field, this is your chance to get full funding for testing your theory across cultures. Apply: study.besample.app/jfe/form/SV_...

One myth about empathy not included is that people know how empathic they are. Bill Ickes has shown no significant correlation has been found between the scores on various empathy scales and the measurement of empathic accuracy.

A list of 7 claims about empathy that many people agree with, but that are likely wrong. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Participants reported that reducing meat intake was more challenging when - eating out vs. at home - eating in company vs. alone - during dinner vs. other meals www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Adversarial collaboration by @jordanaxt.bsky.social et al suggests implicit racial bias has a small (2.5%) additional effect on discriminatory behaviour, but explicit racial attitude predicts 45% of discrimination: buff.ly/0ws4BAL TL;DR:🧵https://buff.ly/Cr0jLml

What do children and adults in 33 communities think about animal minds? New collaborative research from our team of >50 collaborators show universal beliefs that while animals feel like us, our (human) thoughts are different/unique! Check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #mindperception

Great article about fertility in South Korea. That motherhood penalty 😳 worksinprogress.co/issue/two-is...

Many psychologists are treating LLMs as if they are the mind of god. This study had chatGPT rate how central academic disciplines are to various constructs. Why would chatGPT know this? Where is the evidence its ratings are reliable or valid? compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Evolutionary principles are often mischaracterized and misapplied, also by laypeople. This paper explores the use of evolutionary arguments and speculations in the online "manosphere". doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

🚨STOP, replication time!🚨 Does Feeling “Right” Make the Good More Good (and the Bad More Bad)? Achar & Lee found that when people experience regulatory fit, moral predispositions get amplified—moral folks act more moral, less moral folks act less moral. Big, exciting claim!

Special issue on meta-science in Journal of Economic Psychology! Topics covered among others: expert-informed approaches, normative biases and crowd-science. Submitted papers evaluated & published on rolling basis. @i4replication.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

"Replication rates are higher than experts predicted and p-hacking is much less common than we expected!" replications.clearerthinking.org/three-surpri...

Excited to share a Registered Report in J. of Personality looking at the “perils of partialing” – led by the Bluesky-less Leigha Rose with @drlynam.bsky.social and me. (1) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This review highlights that some behaviors are moral and prosocial but go against social norms, and the people who engage in them can be stigmatized. osf.io/preprints/ps...