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SHE'S ALIVE!!

good morning! here's a new preprint led by @matthewmatix.bsky.social on a fascinating idea about sincere responding on #conspiracybelief studies. together a bunch of us (it's all Matt) take a look at whether we can identify sincerity and whether it distorts known effect sizes osf.io/preprints/ps...

The absolute state of academic spam

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

I am very proud to have published my second file-drawer report at my favourite journal Meta-Psychology together with Lisa Incerti, @tobiasrebholz.bsky.social, Christian Seida, and Frank Papenmeier. It includes four failed attempts to confirm a new hypothesis on #anchoringeffects.

1. Aotearoa New Zealand friends and colleagues 🇳🇿, Logistics for my February trip are coming together. I'd love to meet more of you and/or talk with groups of interested colleagues about AI course and teaching in a ChatGPT world (thebullshitmachines.com). Right now, my schedule is as follows:

Good to see that Gauhar (2016) is now retracted, with a pretty frank editorial note. spj.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Some people bring up (1) the cost of criticism and (2) that a lot of criticism has already been voiced but ignored. Both points are valid, so here are some suggestion for (1) reducing backlash and (2) increasing impact (from this talk of mine: juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

A neat APS Observer piece in which I am proudly nonsignificant

Testing the socio-functional model: Does precarity cause conspiracy belief? TLDR; probably not huge thx: Antipodean Misinformation and Conspiracies Club @matthewmatix.bsky.social @lingtax.bsky.social @scicomguy.bsky.social @srhastraea.bsky.social @eddieclarke.bsky.social & students osf.io/nq3y7/

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title. If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing. I can tell you what I think of that for free. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

years ago I took some interest in the notion of precarity–the subjective experience of permanent insecurity rising from objective material strain–causing conspiracy belief. along with my undergraduate students (over 2 yrs), and my antipodean collaborators we tested this theory osf.io/preprints/ps...

Come join an absolutely amazing researcher here in stunning Christchurch ! 📓

Did you guess "that paper does not actually exist"? Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? (Though I confess I only thoroughly checked for half of them, including databases for the journals.)

When your country's collective ability to bullshit on the internet is extensive enough to shape AI slop.

We might be at a stage where systematic reviews without checks of trustworthiness become a problem in itself - even a danger to patients, as these reviews are considered as highest level of evidence and the foundation of guidelines and clinical practice

Do you find the peer review at Frontiers too demanding? The standards too rigorous? The frontiers too... plural? Introducing: Frontier in Medical and Health Research!

7. the kinda appealing, but substantively indefensible, idea that somehow AI is different to other technology, like calculators, in a pedagogical context — but we totally ban a great deal of technology in the classroom. (Section 3.7 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) 9/n

Stop submitting AI slop to journals and preprint servers This is anti-social behavior. It is making life harder for everyone involved except for the person submitting the slop

My time as Editor of AMPPS is coming to an end-- here are some parting thoughts. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... .

What prompts people to change their minds about conspiracy theories? Associate Professor Matt Williams and team from Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University set out to answer this curious question! 👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽 www.royalsociety.org.nz/research/new...

our dear leader @matthewmatix.bsky.social has posted on what the Antipodean Misinformation and Conspiracies Club has been up to over the past few years www.royalsociety.org.nz/research/new...

JW: We developed a tool, INSPECT SR, which looks at various red flags, such as retractions, inconsistencies between preregistration and publication, image duplications, means vs SDs, outcome data, etc. We do give training workshops. bmjopen.bmj.com/content/14/3... #IRICSydney

Experimental participants to us

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized. This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science. 5/n

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

@srhastraea.bsky.social is a humble & busy guy so the aussie will announce his successful #marsden Unpacking how we choose who to trust for knowledge in complex, contentious issues with the potential for misinformation @scicomguy.bsky.social @matthewmatix.bsky.social @rachelprozac.bsky.social

Are you interested in thinking about which studies are worth replicating? Then you have 10 articles to dig into in Meta-Psychology, representing a very wide range of viewpoint on this topic, out now: open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

We built the openESM database: ▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place ▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software ▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python Find out more: 🌐 openesmdata.org 📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Extremely pleased to see this work published! Thank you so much to my excellent collaborators @fmsmallfield.bsky.social @scicomguy.bsky.social @srhastraea.bsky.social @lingtax.bsky.social @mdmarques.com @matthewmatix.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Papers from July to Sept 2025 at AMPPS are killer. We don't have formal print issues, but we have this-- journals.sagepub.com/toc/ampa/8/3

Separating the whack from the chaff in critiques of decision theory statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/10/17/s...

The existential threat model suggests stress & anxiety can lead to belief in conspiracy theories. And prior studies have showed they are *correlated* with belief in CTs. But do they *cause* belief in CTs? Find the answer here... (Or apply Betteridge's law of headlines, if you're pressed for time)

Results of the replication are in! Chocolate is more desirable than poop: Cohen's d_rm = 6.20, 95%CI [5.63, 6.78] N = 486, two single item 1-7 Likert scales of desirability. w/ @jamiecummins.bsky.social

I think words are valuable when they describe some things but not others.

Should statistical software that estimates causal effects also tell you the causal assumptions under which that estimate can be interpreted as causal? I don't know but my PhD student Maurice Korf has some thoughts (and software) to get the conversation going: academic.oup.com/ije/article/...

PCI Psychology is open for submissions! Did you know that you can easily submit your recommended preprint to any of the 20+ PCI Psych friendly journals? See all friendly journals here: psych.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_fr... #PsychSciSky #SciPub

My article "Data is not available upon request" was published in Meta-Psychology. Very happy to see this out! open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

Excited for my doctoral research to be published, thanks to the support of @matthewmatix.bsky.social @srhastraea.bsky.social

In which the authors of a 2023 Psych Science paper claim that the correlation between two constants is 1

I'm joining the brilliant @jkarl.bsky.social as co-EIC at Europe's Journal of Psychology. ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop EJOP is a generalist psych journal, and applies a diamond open access model (no APC). I'd love to see more submissions with rigorous methods & well-calibrated conclusions!

PhD holder who didn't collect any original data for my thesis checking in 🙋 The world isn't short of data to analyse! (I did collect data for my Masters... pen-and-paper surveys from primary school kids... back in the olden days!)

Some researchers don't discuss their future research plans for fear of being scooped. Not me. I drop bad ideas for unscrupulous people to 'steal'. - What are the neural correlates of Open Science practices? - What is the role of habits in learning a new skill through repetitive practice?

BEWARE: Surveys that allow anyone to "opt in" are vulnerable to those who create many accounts (using VPN to bypass IP limits) & use automated tools to generate bogus responses (such as saying "yes" to question about being licensed to operate nuclear submarines). www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

"Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds" Or does it? Let's take a look at this "study"... www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

PsyArXiv's amazing team of 100+ moderators has now approved all preprints that meet the requirements outlined in the updated PsyArXiv policies (is.gd/paxpolicy). Thank you to everyone who volunteered, this was a true community effort! #PsychSciSky

If you have submitted a preprint to PsyArXiv in the last year or so and it *isn't* currently accessible, there's a good chance it's due to the document listing authors whom you haven't entered in the metadata.

Great list for all kinds of claims, not just autism.