Do ant colonies work like liquid brains? Check this great paper in @pnas.org led by @ceabcsic.bsky.social Pol Fernandez and F.Bartumeus that shows how to explain collective foraging by modelling ants as neural agents @jordipinero.bsky.social @frazambelli.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Day 2 of #30DayChartChallenge: Slope. Canadians spent a *lot* more time alone in 2022 compared to 2005. But that comparison is especially stark for young Canadians. Code: github.com/ivabrunec/30...

Half of business owners on this Toronto street estimated that more than 25% of their customers arrived by car. In fact, it was 4%. And the % of customers who who walked or cycled? 72%. Retailers routinely overestimate the # of “car customers.” Via @carltonreid.com www.forbes.com/sites/carlto...

Check out this brief review of our work by Jessica Palmieri and @mschoenauer.bsky.social They do an excellent job of summarizing the main findings for a broader audience! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! A general overview of stats in public policy research with this (oversimplified but still helpful) separation of methods into description, explanation, and prediction #policysky HTML/PDF: stats.andrewheiss.com/snoopy-spring/ SocArXiv: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Excited to see this big collaborative project out in the world @naturehumbehav.bsky.social ! Sleep actively enhances memory for the temporal sequence - but not sensory details - of our real-life experiences, even months-to-years later. 🧠 oscillations matter. Original 🧵: bsky.app/profile/diam...

@diamondn.bsky.social et al. find that sleep enhances memory for the order of events from an art tour, but not the details of the events. The sleep-related advantage for sequences persists for over a year. @brianlevine.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In this Perspective, Dörr et al. argue that research on social media has mainly focused on anti-social behaviours and call for more research on the ways in which social media platforms can empower pro-social behaviour. https://www.nature.c...

In this new preprint from our lab, we share exciting new findings on how „Sleep resolves competition between explicit and implicit memory systems!“ 🧠 💤 🚨 Kleespies, Paulus, et al. @katjakleespies.bsky.social @philipppaulus.bsky.social For a brief walkthrough, I refer you to Katja‘s post below!

🚨 New lab paper!🚨 A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's the post-"standard model" age! Our Preview of a fantastic new study from Yi Zhong's lab on the role of the hippocampus in updating remote memories. Fun putting this together with Ali Golbabaei. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kZ4f3BtfH...

(1/4) Our new JEP:G paper dives into how moral values and misinformation spread on social media: media.mola-lab.org/file/1737039...

New modelling of how episodic memory can arise from spatial mapping, just out in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This week's cover and editorial @thelancet.bsky.social on mis- and disinformation's impact on public health www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

In case you were wondering how things are going in Germany & on X, after Elon Musk announced his support for the far-right "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD) in the upcoming Federal election: The chart below shows sums of tweets x impressions by members of parliament over the past 7 days...🧵⤵️

perhaps another reason why econ and its related fields have been losing favor: epistemic supremacy of RCTs leads to incoherent policy recs

Trust in public health agencies has fallen and not recovered. I asked Biden’s top health official what he thinks went wrong. “I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said.

Basically my view is this: right now, the vast majority of voters are getting either some or all of their political information from a giant unregulated ambient media ecosystem, which only really shows them ideas that will excite or anger them, largely free of any fact-checking

If you feel that BlueSky is “different“ from X, the data supports you :) Using a network of 15M users (56% of the platform) we find that the probability that the log-normal law is wrong wrt to the power-law is just ~7% Why that matters? Pop 🧵 follows! 1/ #scaling #NetSky #ComplexSystems 🧪

Here's our full story on the Meta news today, which goes far beyond an end to fact-checking and heralds a wider pullback from content moderation as Zuckerberg repositions the company for the Trump era. Gift link: wapo.st/4h223hP

Community noteas take time to identify and attach, and only have any effect after this processes has completed---long after much of the exposure occurs. They also have lesser effect implicity on any content posted by large accounts as they get a *ton* of spread before a community note can be found.

Reflecting on the remarkable announcement from Meta today regarding content moderation. @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social & I & team had a recent paper looking at the diffusion of (mis)information on Facebook during the 2020 election. A few reflections... sociologicalscience.com/articles-v11...

“We find that fact-checks are successful in debunking misperceptions. Moreover, this debunking effect is consistent across countries” Posting this key finding from our recent 16 country study. For no particular reason today. doi.org/10.1080/1520...

🚨In Nature🚨 Meta is dropping fact-checking to avoid anti-conservative bias- but is there actually evidence of bias? We this test empirically & find that conservatives * ARE suspended more * BUT share more misinfo So suspension isn't necessarily evidence of bias www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A big one today with @mikecaulfield.bsky.social. It's about Jan 6th but its really about trying to diagnose what precisely is broken about our information ecosystem and why everything feels so stuck. It's about how the internet is a justification machine. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

We have a new paper explaining all the ways you can use natural language processing to analyze text data in @natrevpsych.bsky.social We provide user friendly recommendations for using NLP to ensure rigour and reproducibility Here is a free link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Honored that a piece I wrote made it to NYTimes. It’s about how my mom’s stroke changed my connection to time, science, and nature. What a privilege to honor my mom in Modern Love. Below is a gift link. Let me know your thoughts 🙏🏼 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/s...

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

PREPRINT: Across 26 countries, we find strong preferences for individual ownership of social media feeds, commercial shopping site setup, and other online platforms. Across countries, people prefer individual ownership far more than government or commercial policy oversight. osf.io/preprints/os...

I write ab propaganda & bespoke realities. Terms like “misinformation” miss the point, treat persuasive comms as a problem of facts, &underweight the immersive experience described in here. “We are the media now” is itself a basic propaganda claim to truth + power. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The limiting factor for MRI based prediction of behavioral traits may be neither the imaging nor the pipeline or learning algorith but rather the reliability of the target phenotypes Thought provoking work my Martin Gell et al: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our team still studies “collective sensemaking” during breaking news events. What we see with MH17 and Jan6 are attacks on the sensemaking process itself… not just a distortion (like those described in this article) but a denial of service attack on sensemaking. www.cip.uw.edu/2023/12/06/r...

New publication (4+ years in the making): “The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook”. shorturl.at/VE2fU We analyze the propagation of 1B+ posts across content moderation regimes, with @davidlazer.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social @taliastroud.bsky.social @annenbergpenn.bsky.social

Field Experiments have matured from academic curiosity to bona fide contributor to knowledge in the past few decades. Yet, the political economy of their deployment in government remains ill-understood. We provide insights in a new working paper, available here: ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura...

Do citizens trust their governments more if they are committed to evidence-based policymaking? What happens when evaluation results disappoint? In this new WP, we explore how policymakers & the public react to unexpected evidence: drive.google.com/file/d/13SmS... Comments welcome! #EconSky

My latest writing on why we need more #exploratory research. I'm curious what people think about it. rdcu.be/d1Fkj

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization? We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

New article in Journal of Communication looking at changes to trust in news across 46 countries in the last 10 years. Trust in news declined in just over half of countries. It decreased more in countries where TV news use has declined, and/or where social media news use has grown. A thread:

Some thoughts about doing science in academia vs. the public service, & continuing to be a huge nerd. tldr: science is tight, do it everywhere medium.com/impact-canad...

Not very surprising, but good to have an estimate: "shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Simulating human behavior with AI agents promises a testbed for policy and the social sciences. We interviewed 1,000 people for two hours each to create generative agents of them. These agents replicate their source individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109

New #preprint! We surveyed 71,922 people in 68 countries to find out: Where do they come across information about #science? How do they #communicate about it? We also tested country factors like #AcademicFreedom and #PressFreedom and identified interesting patterns 🔎 ➡️ osf.io/preprints/os... 🧵 1/10

🧵The study everyone here is talking about does NOT provide evidence that Twitter/X pushed a pro-Republican home timeline ranking change in July 2023. The cascading, multiplicative effects of ranking changes likely explain the effect--details below

Podcasts are a popular medium, but data for computational research is limited! We introduce the Structured Podcast Research Corpus (SPoRC - huggingface.co/datasets/bli...), a large, multimodal dataset of English podcasts 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2411.07892

🚨 How should we design surveys to capture opinion in fast-changing contexts like elections or within hard-to-reach communities? 🚨 My paper, conditionally accepted at Political Analysis, develops a method that leverages LLMs and adaptive algorithms to construct surveys that evolve with user input.

The exodus from X/Twitter has finally started, but maybe Twitter should have died a long time ago? Our new research published today shows how political abuse on X is a global, widespread, and cross-partisan phenomenon. Out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key results🧵

Just published: "Fractured Platforms, Unified Narratives" - a deep dive into the 2024 election through the lens of storytelling and identity politics, the migration from X to Bluesky, a CITAP book review on January 6th & more.

Out now in PNAS and led by the amazing @msultan.bsky.social with a great team from ARC at MPIB, our systematic meta-analysis of individual factors for misinformation susceptibility: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...