It's publication day! Check out this thread for a summary of our new paper ❝Delegation to AI can increase unethical behaviour❞ Lots of love and labor got into this paper and I'm thrilled to see it out in the wild today

I've been shushed my entire life—in Starbucks, by strangers, even by my own wife. But maybe the problem isn't that I'm loud. Maybe it's that we automatically assume quiet is virtuous. Am I the asshole? You tell me.

Just found out that I am the 2025 recipient of the Diener Award in Social Psychology from SPSP. I couldn’t have done it without my mentors (official and otherwise), students, and collaborators. I'm proud of this, but mostly just grateful I get to do work I love.

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

New paper! Different to my usual schtick concerning cognitive costs. We analysed differences in learning between depressed and healthy students and whether Pavlovian biases differed between them. We found mixed evidence... have a read! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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/...

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

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.

Universities have writing centers but no public speaking centers. We just throw academics on stage and hope for the best. New post breaks down 10 ways to connect with your audience and actually enjoy giving talks (yes, it's possible).

Online Now: Are metabolic costs needed to explain cognitive fatigue?

My Globe and Mail opinion piece on the attack this week at our local “kosher Loblaws.” It is now being investigated as a hate motivated crime. I reflect on what it now means to go grocery shopping while Jewish in Canada in 2025. www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/bc5ccfd...

The far left hates Jews for being “white colonizers.” The far right hates Jews for not being white enough. Antisemitism comes from all sides, and it must be condemned every single time. This poster, seen in Maine, is shocking and must never be normalized. Never again.

"The framework requires a commitment to actively fighting racism; choosing to be simply 'non-prejudiced' or 'non-racist' can unintentionally support passive racism." (Inzlicht, 2025) #EduSky #PsychSciSky #Psychology #PsychSky #SocialPsych #SocialPsychology #AcademicSky

Interesting research finding: when trying to reduce prejudice, the how matters as much as the what. Coercive approaches can sometimes backfire. New post exploring the psychology of persuasion and a frustrating academic story.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

I set out to learn pickleball and accidentally discovered what diversity workshops wish they could create. 84-year-old widowers, Vietnamese mothers, recovering alcoholics all united by willingness to look ridiculous chasing plastic balls. Sometimes the joke is the point.

Time to confess and unburden. A reader chose love over studying in France, then got dumped 2 years later. Another confesses to creating a vicious echo chamber during online debates. Plus me having no regrets about a recent post that cost me readers.

Does cognitive fatigue require metabolic explanations? @jakeembrey.bsky.social and I argue the evidence is pretty thin. Computational & motivational theories may be sufficient without invoking depleting brain glucose or accumulating neurotoxins like glutamate. New commentary, in press at TiCS

We can probably laugh away claims that AI is evil or racist and such like, but there are others that merit being taken more seriously. @minzlicht.bsky.social rounds up the AI takes that worry him and those that don’t: buff.ly/tQS3Gfg

Hot take: Using AI to write your college essay might be BETTER for the environment than writing it yourself. But AI that enables your worst impulses while degrading critical thinking? I mind, man! The Dude minds. New essay sorting AI wheat from chaff.

Beautiful essay by an 81-year old clinical psychologist. "ChatGPT may not understand, but it made understanding possible. More than anything, it offered steadiness. And for someone who spent a life helping others hold their thoughts, that steadiness mattered more than I ever expected."

I reply here to Mickey Inzlicht’s critique of our assessment of the TMT literature -led by former grad students, Lihan Chen and Rachele Benjamin. We consider the question of how can we best evaluate a literature and, judging from his critique, reach a controversial conclusion.

Effort feels bad. We dodge it, minimize it, complain about it. But we also crave it. In our new paper, we revisit the effort paradox and show why the aversion and the attraction make sense. With @aidanvcampbell.bsky.social & @blairsaunders.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Last week I declared terror management theory dead and accused my friend Steve Heine of motivated reasoning. Steve responded like the mensch he is with a solid rebuttal instead of blocking me. Read his guest post and tell us both who you think is right in the comments!

This new AESP chapter piqued my interest. As someone studying procrastination, I can see why effort is avoided (e.g., part of task aversion) & is also valued (e.g., deep satisfaction, work ethic). I look forward to taking a deep dive & gaining new insights into the role of effort in procrastination.

New lab paper on leisure, effort, and meaning by @aidanvcampbell.bsky.social, @gregdepow.bsky.social, and Srishti Agarwal from @amuselabs.bsky.social. Check it out!

For decades, psychologists believed reminding people of death would make them fry themselves in tanning booths, recommend harsher punishments for prostitutes, support martyrdom, and spend more on luxury goods. Rigorous testing revealed: nope. But dead theories have a way of refusing to stay buried.

Western University is offering new scholarships of up to 40k CAD for four years to doctoral students who are studying at, have an offer from, or have had an offer rescinded from one of the top 100 American universities. Come and study with me or one of my colleagues!

I absolutely loved @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social's article. It starts one way and ends in another. Beautifully written, and as usual with Paul, reveals something interesting and true. Read it!

Apparently hanging your diplomas in your office is a dead giveaway that you don't belong in academia. Who knew? Growing up in a house with no degrees, my mom's synagogue volunteer plaques were the only "achievements" on our walls. So yeah, my diplomas are staying up. New post.

This is an important piece on philosophy of science from @minzlicht.bsky.social. It also should be a wake-up call for journal editors who demand more & greater theoretical contributions for publication. Theories can build from bottom up descriptives. And that allows perspectivism a la Bill McGuire.

I just became president of a scientific society and my first act was to disagree with one of my heroes...Arie Kruglanski gave a keynote arguing social psychology needs MORE Big Beautiful Theories. I think that's exactly backwards. Here's why...

Motivation and Emotion is seeking a new Editor-in-Chief! 4-year term starting Jan 2025. Looking for someone with vision, experience in motivation/emotion research, and editorial chops. Deadline: Aug 1. Ready to shape the field? Details: [email protected]

I watched "No Other Land" and was heartbroken by Palestinian families losing their homes. I then caught myself immediately deflecting with "but what about..." arguments to soothe my discomfort. Made me think: when is whataboutism a lazy dodge vs. legitimate context? New essay on moral reasoning.

Sometimes you need to be told to shut the fuck up, Donny. My story of moderating psychology's civil war, complete with sock puppets, drama, and the naive belief that academics could discuss their crumbling field civilly. Spoiler: they couldn't. New post. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

📣 Excited to share our new preprint: "Measuring Perceived Structural Constraints on Choice: The Structural Awareness Scale" (SAS) osf.io/preprints/os... We developed SAS to capture how people perceive 🧱 structural barriers on their choices in areas such as sustainability or healthy eating.

New post: What if the best things in life… had no point at all? I wrote about bowling, mice on running wheels, the overjustification effect, and why The Dude abides while we optimize ourselves into misery. Sometimes joy needs no justification. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

this is like drake and kendrick lamar but they're both drake

Great commentary @minzlicht.bsky.social on @chazfirestone.bsky.social WEIRD science critique (paper is a great read too) - we have work coming out on boredom in non-WEIRD groups showing culture matters little - stay tuned! www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/keep-cogni...

Fish see visual illusions the same way humans do. Flies too. And bees. This changes everything about the WEIRD sampling debate in cognitive psychology. New post on @dorsaamir.bsky.social and @chazfirestone.bsky.social's devastating paper.

As long as “Free Palestine” activists are showing up at synagogues with guns, vandalizing Holocaust memorials, murdering Jews outside of our museums, and firebombing Jewish events, your movement is nothing more than a violent threat to Jews.

For those interested in universal MH interventions in schools, there’s a new meta analysis out today by Hayes et al and I wanted to highlight a few points 🧵 www.frontiersin.org/journals/chi...

Do ADHD awareness materials increase self-diagnosis of ADHD? This is a really important new study (still preprint) indicating that these materials increase liklihood of self-diagnosis but *don't* increase symptom reporting, suggesting the materials change not symptoms but the framing of them /1

Humans and other animals minimize effort when possible, but effort paradoxically enhances the value of rewards and activities. @minzlicht.bsky.social et al propose and explore three potential resolutions to this paradox: buff.ly/wgdYYkJ

My paper with @minzlicht.bsky.social on how trait empathy and features of the context such as valence predict everyday state experiences of empathy is now published #OpenAccess in #PSBP 🥳. Check it out here and let me know if you have any questions: doi.org/10.1177/0146....

"We should learn how the AI beat us at Go, rather than just lamenting our defeat" from my awesome UofT colleagues Jessie Hall & @karinavold.bsky.social iai.tv/articles/ai-...

Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on 4 inhibitory control tasks, Lee et al. show that more than 1000 trials/participant are necessary to reduce within-subject variability and improve the reliability of the congruency effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Japan gets something we don't: the subway cleaner and burger cook aren't weird for caring so much about his work—they're practicing a philosophy of presence. Meanwhile we optimize everything into meaninglessness. New post! open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

I’ve had lots of messages about my Guardian article, in which I argued we should stop universal mental health lessons in schools. The messages have fallen into three categories, and I’m reflecting on this here because I think it exposes something interesting in the field (and research in general) 🧵