A decade ago, psychology went to war with itself over replication. For one year, I was the referee, moderating a Facebook group meant to keep the fights civil. Worst year of my academic life. The full story, originally paywalled, is now free: open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

New guest post by my PhD student @hellovic.bsky.social. She writes about her new working paper finding that most Americans don't oppose AI. But those who do treat it as a moral issue, refusing tradeoffs and even money. Why that makes AI debates so hard. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

New paper out! Some AI companies anthropomorphize their products to boost trust. But does it work? And can anthropomorphism benefit them beyond increased trust? We tested this across two studies. Here's what we found:

There's no other way to say this: PUB DATE! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/745513...

I have a student who is considering putting together a symposium at SPSP on the psychology gleaned from specific films. We'll be covering--what else--The Big Lebowski. Anyone else interested in putting something together?

I want to defend punching down in academia. Scratch that. I want to defend punching, full stop. Up, down, sideways. The norm against critiquing junior scholars publicly comes from a good place but breaks something fundamental about how science works. New essay. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

My lab posted a paper on AI opposition. Someone threatened me with a guillotine. The replies proved our findings better than the data did. New post! open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Are different desires (e.g., food, sleep, alcohol, cannabis) experienced and regulated the same way? We tested this question in a new preprint with Yang Liu, @minzlicht.bsky.social, @wilhelmhofmann.bsky.social, and @kevinmking.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

@nature.com has published three groundbreaking papers on reproducibility, analytical robustness, and replicability across the social sciences. Sincere thanks are due to the many folks who contributed to these projects. It’s painstaking work, and a great service to social science.

Researchers affiliated with SRI at @utoronto.ca (including @semrasevi.bsky.social, Elliot Creager, Matt Ratto, @zhijingjin.bsky.social, & @minzlicht.bsky.social) are part of 8 new CIFAR projects focused on examining AI Safety through the lens of social sciences & the humanities. shorturl.at/NAwej

🚨 New preprint with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social! The empathic voice penalty: Vocal delivery reduces perceived empathy in humans and AI osf.io/preprints/ps... We know AI often outperforms humans at text-based empathy—but what happens when emotional support is expressed vocally?

I've known @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and Dominic Packer for 20 years. Partly responsible for me ending up at UofT. They write one of the best psychology Substacks around. This week I'm republishing their piece on the bystander effect and why the Kitty Genovese story isn't what we thought.

Qualitative coding 3,183 open-ended responses by hand would take 80+ hours. With an LLM-assisted workflow, Gino Carmona-Díaz and colleagues in Colombia did it in 10. ICC = .824. Full tutorial, prompts, and code are open access. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

18 months ago I wrote about the fall of stereotype threat. It's making rounds again. DominicPacker and @jayvanbavel.bsky.social republished it, Mary Murphy wrote a lengthy rebuttal, and the debate is alive. I have thoughts. For now: the original essay, with one important addition.

We created a new scale to measure AI sycophancy in conversations with no right answer. Three facets: Uncritical Agreement, Obsequiousness, Excitement. People hate the flattery but welcome the enthusiasm. And sycophancy correlated with perceived empathy across every study. arxiv.org/abs/2603.15448

Check out @hellovic.bsky.social's new paper on the moralization of AI: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ort check out a cool infographic of the paper.

Check out my student @hellovic.bsky.social's new paper: The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence With @reemayad.bsky.social, @eloisecote.bsky.social, @yoelinbar.net, and Jason Plaks

Three cheers for humility about AI and limits of human understanding. Resonates with how I've been thinking about AI, empathy, metascience with @minzlicht.bsky.social @jdweng.bsky.social @mgreinecke.bsky.social @jimaceverett.bsky.social. Well written and incisive, this post is really worth a read.

Wrote up my impressions of this year's SPSP conference. A 21-year analysis of the field's political drift, a tribute to Sam Sommers, AI-generated slides with zero apology, and a party I maybe shouldn't have attended. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Fun to read this after my post on stereotype threat was republished by @jayvanbavel.bsky.social et al. I don't agree with all that Mary wrote, but it's worth a read. One place I'll push back: if stereotype threat only really affects feelings (and not performance) would it have made the same impact?

Today Dominic Packer & @jayvanbavel.bsky.social republished @minzlicht.bsky.social's post about "The Downfall of Stereotype Threat" in their widely-read The Power Of Us newsletter. I felt a certain way about that & the evidence presented there & thought I'd respond:

1/ Calling all Psychonomics people who care about motivation. The Society for the Science of Motivation (SSM) is looking for someone to organize a preconference ("Affiliate Meeting") at the 2026 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting.

1/ New paper in Communications Psychology: Against Frictionless AI. Led by my student Emily Zohar and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social. The argument: AI's greatest selling point is also its problem. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New paper in Current Directions in Psych Science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... After countless arguments about what tasks ppl should/should not offload to AI, we instead argue that genAI can be used *augment* research protocols in novel ways. I.e. use AI to make better psych experiments!

#UTSC student Dariya Ovsyannikova and Professor Michael Inzlicht share research on AI and empathy: why chatbot responses can be rated as more compassionate, what that says about how we listen, and why safeguards matter when people turn to bots for support, via BBC Online bbc.in/4qXU0rq #UofT

Conference season is here. Many of you are doing it wrong. You flew across the country to check your email in a different city. New post on what conferences are actually for. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Preprint of "Wise Empathy Improves Well-being on Instagram" is now available: osf.io/preprints/ps... Effects of social media on well-being vary, and depend greatly on online experiences. Here, we present a wise empathy intervention to change digital experiences and improve well-being. #empathy 1/4

1/ New paper! Invisible Saboteurs: Sycophantic LLMs Mislead Novices in Problem-Solving Tasks Sycophantic LLMs aren't merelt annoying, they actively sabotage novices trying to learn complex tasks. We ran an experiment to find out how bad it actually is. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03667

When given the choice, participants sought human empathy, despite rating AI responses as more empathetic and making them feel more heard. @jdweng.bsky.social @dcameron.bsky.social @minzlicht.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Proud advisor moment. Check out my student, Emily Zohar's, new paper (her first first-authored paper) on how norms shape how effort. Yes, when we see hard workers around us, we work harder. But...when we see lazy people around us, we also work harder. Check it out! psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

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

New publication with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social in @commspsychol.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... AI empathy is good, but would people actually choose to turn to AI for emotional support over a human empathizer?

After 20 years as psychology's golden child, ego depletion collapsed. Now it's back...with a catch. The secret? Make people work for 30-40 minutes instead of 5. In other words, we finally discovered fatigue. New post on the redemption tour.

New review paper led by @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social: Mental health awareness campaigns reduce stigma but can also lead to problematic self-diagnosis and symptom misinterpretation. These trade-offs matter, especially for adolescents. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I just evaluated many student/job applications by hand. I have little confidence I did it fairly though. Order effects, mood, fatigue, and subjectivity all bias my evaluations. Maybe the responsible thing would've been to let AI do it. New post.

AI companions have become increasingly popular. But what’s their overall impact on our lives? Join Yiran Hua, @minzlicht.bsky.social & @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social at @uoftethics.bsky.social to discuss ethical questions about AI companions. Jan. 23, 5 p.m. - 7 p.m. www.eventbrite.ca/e/ai-compani...

I told my daughter to hide her Star of David in public. I hate myself for it. But I did it anyway. A letter to my non-Jewish friends. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Merry Chrismukkah to my readers and friends. I wrote something you might enjoy. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

I just republished an essay about visiting Poland and why I felt uneasy there. This is about forgiveness, nations confronting their past, and my own blind spots. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

I quite enjoyed answering questions about what got me interested in empathy, what surprised and interested me in a recent paper on state and trait empathy, and how I think about some of the interpersonal implications of my research. Thank you to @theloveconsortium.bsky.social for the opportunity!

Excited to announce a new open-access EMP Lab paper on empathic AI: an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychology, philosophy, & engineering on motivated empathy expression and reception with social robots. @ssripennstate.bsky.social @psuliberalarts.bsky.social @rockethics.bsky.social 1/n

Excited to share work led by Conrado Eiroa-Solans, a PhD student at UC Berkeley who I first met when he was applying to grad school. His new paper is out in Computers in Human Behavior Reports. /1

New Nature Medicine study: doulas with a few weeks of training delivered therapy as effectively as PhD clinicians. Same outcomes. If that's true, what exactly requires 5-7 years of grad school? And what does it mean for AI therapy? The therapy elite won't like this.

I wrote a Substack every week during sabbatical without fail, but I can't stop eating carrot cake from the bakery down my street. The difference? "Want-to" motivation beats "have-to" motivation every time. New essay on why loving what you do matters more than willpower.

Excited to share new work led by the amazing Dasha Sandra, a PhD student at UofT. We tackled a tricky problem: mental health awareness can reduce stigma, but it can also cause healthy people to falsely self-diagnose. /1 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Science of Motivation has opened nominations for the editorship of Motivation Science, a multidisciplinary journal that publishes significant contributions to the study of motivation.

Very problematic beer taste?!

People are lazy--except when they're watching other people work hard. My student Emily Zohar just published her first first-authored paper, and it reveals something surprising about effort and social norms. /1 osf.io/preprints/ps...

I don't usually write grateful posts, but I wanted to thank the people who shaped my career: from my PhD advisor who taught me to write, to the student who taught me courage. New post!

New chapter with @dcameron.bsky.social, Martina Orlandi, and @minzlicht.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps... In this chapter, we argue that instead of debating whether human or AI empathy is superior overall, it is more useful to focus on the distinct trade-offs that each source of empathy offers.