The Empathy & Moral Psychology Lab will be at APS in Barcelona! Unfortunately, I can't be there in person. Check out @amormino.bsky.social's symposium & talk, @jokretz.bsky.social's first talk, two talks by @jdweng.bsky.social (including one on my behalf), @farvk.bsky.social's poster. A great team!

1/ We've been measuring intellectual humility wrong. Most scales ask "are you intellectually humble?" but the people least humble are the most miscalibrated about it. They overclaim. The #humilityparadox. Out today in Behavior Research Methods. Here's what we did instead. 🧵

A meta-analysis is not a ‘easy’ publication. Search strategy development, screening, more screening, data extraction, requesting additional data, risk of bias assessments, the actual synthesis, write up—it all takes time. Many people heavily underestimate the resources required to complete one

The preprint is now available: osf.io/preprints/ps... Thanks to the PsyArXiv moderators for their speedy review! Freely available to any who want to read about the many ways in which the oft-cited literature on desistance spectacularly fails to support the claim of widespread desistance

I consider Dr. Foa’s exposure therapy work among the most profound achievements in clinical psychology. Her work has saved so, so many lives. She led a big life. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/h...

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

I'm excited to announce one of the two big Consortium on Moral Decision-Making conferences for spring 2026. In June, we're collaborating with Penn State Center for Social Data Analytics to host "AI and Social Research: Empathic AI, Metascience, and Methodology" here on campus and hybrid on Zoom.

Psychology has a whole cottage industry in which people come up with some construct that is essentially "attitudes/beliefs/expectations/feelings about X", and then the central claim is that this construct is a super important determinant of future X outcomes.>

Ridiculously useful information for anyone designing EMA studies or evaluating EMA studies as a reviewer/consumer of research.

My new career column in Nature is out. After reviewing hundreds of PhD applications for my lab and admissions at the UIUC, I kept seeing the same mistakes. I share 8 common application and interview mistakes and what applicants can do differently. doi.org/10.1038/d415...

I saw we were fighting about what AI will do to (social) science. I have some thoughts (originally written for a book on scientific inquiry) and decided to turn them into my first substack article. Co-written with Nat Rabb! tomstello.substack.com/p/standing-o...

Can this thing also answer Prolific surveys? I am beginning to really worry that the MTurkification of Psych Science might be nearing an end

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)! How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science. Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

The Consortium on Moral Decision-Making is pleased to announce its 2026 proposal cycle for interdisciplinary seed grants for morality and ethics research. Check out our call below, and visit our website (from the press release) to learn about eligibility and how to apply. @ssripennstate.bsky.social

I got 99 problems in online survey research but social desirability ain‘t (a huge) one Important paper ⬇️⬇️

Excellent article! The tone is very measured but the implications are definitely worth field-wide attention!

Super proud advisor moment: kudos to @jdweng.bsky.social for his first first-author publication! With @minzlicht.bsky.social, we inverted the empathy selection task to look at preferences to receive empathy. We can speculate on what people want from AI, but a motivational account suggests we ask 1/n

To potential students, 10/10 would recommend working with Greg Depow!

After a provocation from Todd Kashdan I wrote up some frustrations I have with "wellbeing science", specifically the idea that it was born with life satisfaction scales. I think this belief is untrue and unhelpful. profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

So of course I screwed up the announcement post for the new Hardcore History by not including g the art of Erich Sayers that goes with the show. So...here it is now

We should just use standardized test scores + grades to admit students into college. Everything else is way too easy to game, allowing the extremely rich to dominate access to prestigious colleges. www.nytimes.com/interactive/... I've been saying this for a long time, but the data makes it clear.

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/...

The economists accuse those, to whom the enunciation of their atrocious villainies communicates a thrill of horror, of being sentimentalists. It may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture of sentimentalism in me, God be thanked!

Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨

this is hilarious and miserable. just so tech bros can have their dystopia moment, students have to lose all accessibility provided by remote technology and we the professors lose the flexibility and convenience. but progress, amirite?!

Recently presented at @theloveconsortium.bsky.social's Virtual Symposium on Empathy as an Interpersonal Process with Dr. Kotiuga and Dr. Monroy. I presented on how empathy predicts perceptions of partner responsiveness across positive and negative emotional contexts: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyRA...

⛰️🏔️ Episode 20 is now live! 🏔️⛰️ In this episode, we look at the amazing story of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Find out how the world's largest empire rose, flourished, and finally fell in ash and flame. YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRYd... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6AeH...

"For instance, randomized controlled trials could explicitly manipulate multilingualism"

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky Check out new ShinyApp for testing measurement invariance! By Schemmerling, Kotzur, & Friehs. Out in Social Cognition guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/... (I *love* how researchers create these, and share. Great service to field. Thanks!)

Please join us for "Empathy as an Interpersonal Process," a virtual symposium with moderated discussion on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM Eastern Time. Learn more here: www.theloveconsortium.org/tlc-events

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

Learn more about Dr. Jessica Maxwell's speed dating study, featuring data from 400+ participants at 16 events, in her conversation with TLC Founding Director Sara Algoe in this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXjv...

Major shoutout to @andrew.heiss.phd for recreating FiveThirtyEight's p-hacking app. My teaching prep panic at discovering the broken link lasted only a few minutes of googling thanks to this beautiful replacement: stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way

Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it. 
CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures. 
But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do. 👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette... 🧵

Our latest TLC Newsletter spotlights @jaimiekrems.bsky.social from UCLA and her work as Co-founder/Director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, the first academic hub dedicated to decoding and strengthening friendship. Learn more in our latest newsletter here: go.unc.edu/TLCOctoberNe...

Grace Vieth shares how the unique contextual features of adult friendships make them ideal relationships for positive processes in the latest TLC Newsletter. Read her deep dive here. go.unc.edu/TLCOctoberNe...

For potential grad students: if you're interested in this kind of work on assessing and improving close relationships measures, our group just got a grant to do five more years of it. Join our team!

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Want to know what a sample of 200+ editorial board members think about citing practices in psychology? That and much more in this AMPPS article. We had a lot of fun pulling it together. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Now through 9/5: Preorder from Barnes & Noble and get a special discount on my book! B&N Rewards and Premium Members get 25% off preorders. Premium Members get an additional 10% off physical books. Use coupon code PREORDER25. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bonded-by-... @BarnesandNoble #BNPreorder

Exciting news! I'll be working with the Center for Digital Thriving @digitalthriving.bsky.social as a fellow to develop an intervention aimed at improving the well-being of youth on social media. The intervention will train youth to engage skilfully with emotions on their feed using wise empathy.

When the quant profs and grad students in my department ask me what Brunswick's lens model is

Need to backup your Qualtrics? I needed this urgently given a revocation of my Qualtrics account with my former affiliation. Found William Ryan's R code, but it didn't work for me, so I made some tweaks, and it works now. Hope it's helpful to others: github.com/giladfeldman...

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue

All new assistant professors “enjoying” their first day: have a great one! You’ve got this!!!!!

I love reading philosophy. Most philosophers are so politically incorrect - challenging the status quo, even challenging God. Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane. -- Mike Tyson

Modern theories of emotion (especially “interoceptive inference”) often cite William James as a key inspiration. But what did James actually say about emotion, and is it supported by the data? Here’s a brief look at the core arguments and classic evidence. 🧵