I spent this week contemplating depolarization & cultivating connection at the Mind & Life Institute I spoke about our research on how technology often does more to divide than connect us. I was inspired by the passionate people trying to foster compassion and create better spaces for disagreement.

New paper published in Nature with @i4replication.bsky.social , where we could reproduce 85% of claims published in some economics and political science journals, with 72% of the claims passing various robustness checks. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨 New AI Games round is live 🚨 Our first AI Games paper is now out at a top general interest journal (see preprint here: www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10... So… we’re launching the next stage 👇

Come join us for the screening of "THE AI DOC: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist" on Tuesday night!

Was great to present on developing the moral self and some of my early LLM simulation results for @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social's Morality Lab at Boston College! Felt very welcome by the team especially @trystanloustau.bsky.social and @mtrenfield.bsky.social and received great feedback. Thanks guys! 😎

Excited to see this now published. We unpack how polarization shapes health not just through attitudes, but through group processes and identity-driven decision-making. Here's a publisher-provided free read-only access link to the paper for those interested: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

Today! I will be giving an in-person talk at the Mind Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, hosted by Dr. Pooja Swami Sahni, PhD!

We had the honor of hosting Dr. Marie Bragg at our @centerconflictcooperation.com at NYU, led by @jayvanbavel.bsky.social, for a talk on “strategic science”—being intentional about the questions we pursue, how we study them, and how we communicate our findings for social impact.

{rempsyc} #rstats package v0.2.0 now on CRAN! Last release announcement for this was in July 2024. Since v0.1.8: Improvements to speed, workflow, nice_scatter, nice_lm, nice_lm_slopes, nice_table, and many bug fixes. Let me know if you use my package—it keeps me going! rempsyc.remi-theriault.com

The race to churn out papers is a systemic problem. Early career scholars are desperate to get more papers to compete in the academic job market. This can make it hard for faculty mentors hard to reduce their output unless they shrink their lab (which removes opportunities from next generation).

Can recommend! Reach out if you are interested in how beliefs are formed, the spread of false or misleading information, and social influence processes more generally.

{report} #rstats package version 0.6.2 is now on CRAN! MANY bug fixes in this version! Including corrected duplicated text outputs and dramatic speed increases for brmsfit models (which used to refit the model entirely every time). easystats.github.io/report/ With the @easystats.github.io team

Can reading a book make you a better person? 🤔 Read more in the Power of Us newsletter, featuring insights from social psychologist Rémi Thériault and NYU Professor of Psychology & Neural Science, Jay Van Bavel!

As avid booklovers, we're excited to see the progress of 2024 EVA awardee Rémi Thériault! His research explores how nonfiction books — especially in pop psychology — might influence prosociality and polarisation. 👏

What do 92% of scientists agree on regarding social media and smartphone use? blog.andrewyang.com/p/the-scienc...

Really enjoyed talking with @andrew-yang.bsky.social and @jayvanbavel.bsky.social about the science of social media. Thanks for having us on your podcast, @andrew-yang.bsky.social

Why does online content seem so angry and emotional? Professors @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and @steverathje.bsky.social join andrewyang.com/podcast to talk the science of social media including why polarization gets revved up by a tiny percentage of accounts.

In a new podcast, I discuss the dangers of rising political polarization, how social media incentives contribute to polarization, and why we should consider polarization a social determinant of health with @ryanlinnbrown.bsky.social You can listen here: www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/political-...

New PSA paper led by Tom Heyman! We present a tutorial on crowdsourced MULTIVERSE ANALYSES—a transparent way to test how robust findings are across many analytic paths. Experts suggest, then validate possible paths. This helps quantify uncertainty and clarify when/where scientific conclusions hold.

Review by @rmpillai.bsky.social et al suggests social identity-based group identification and motives influence health behaviours in multiple, mutually reinforcing ways, which explains public health polarization: buff.ly/4tsTuum via coauthor @jayvanbavel.bsky.social

We revisit the classic Theory of Planned Behavior and highlight how social identity plays a critical role in shaping attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control vis-à-vis a host of health behaviors. Polarization, in particular, can have dramatic consequences on public health.

Comparing fiction and non-fiction as broad categories might be misleading. Non-fiction isn't a single genre: some books are probably much more powerful than others and might excel at different things. Could some be especially effective at uniting humankind and reducing conflict?

New preprint: From vaccinations to masking, politics predicts health behaviors. In this review we discuss these differences in light of classic psychological theories of group identity and behavioral decision-making. We welcome any feedback on this working paper! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Indeed! What are some of the books that had the greatest impact on you? Feel free to share as comments or private messages! We are interested in hearing your book suggestions

#statstab #390 modelbased: An R package to make the most out of your statistical models through marginal means, marginal effects, and model predictions Thoughts: Great package for getting predicted probabilities for your models. #rstats #r #easystats doi.org/10.21105/jos...

Excited to share that our manifesto for a more globally diverse, equitable, and inclusive open science, led by @sakshighai.bsky.social was selected for a Commendation Award from the Society for @improvingpsych.org ! You can read the open-access paper here: doi.org/10.1038/s442...

We are very pleased to announce the 2025 Commendations for the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science! Join us in celebrating the exceptional projects that have revolutionized the field of psychological science. buff.ly/rzTeLYL

We are very pleased to announce the 2025 Awards Winners for the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science! Join us in celebrating the exceptional projects that have revolutionized the field of psychological science. buff.ly/rzTeLYL

🚨New paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨 Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? We review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological & structural factors that shape information spread online and offline: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lRke4sIRv...

We're happy to have an accompanying publication for another #rstats #easystats package published! Thanks to @vincentab.bsky.social and @tjmahr.com for reviewing the manuscript!

Are #smartphones and #socialmedia harming a generation? This is a hotly debated and often polarizing debate. So we surveyed over 120 experts on the topic to see where there was genuine consensus (or not), like experts have previous done for climate change. See our paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

We’re introducing a new layer of verification on Bluesky — a user-friendly, easily recognizable blue check. In addition to account verification issued by Bluesky, we're also introducing Trusted Verifiers. Select independent organizations can verify accounts directly.

next Canadian government should think of boosting research funding up here and trying to grab as many American postdocs and researchers as possible

I am thrilled to be starting my postdoc with @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and my wonderful colleagues at the newly launched Center for Conflict and Cooperation @centerconflictcoop.bsky.social at NYU @nyu.edu. Together, we will be working at reducing #polarization and its far-reaching consequences.

Defunding the world’s leading scientific community is akin to a performing a prefrontal lobotomy on the nation—you are effectively severing the connections between the most innovative ideas and its citizens. Cutting support for science harms everyone! www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/a-national...

Recently, the @easystats.bsky.social team (a mix of academics and former academics) discussed the challenges faced by those transitioning from #psychology #academia to data-related jobs, as well as some advantages they have that they might not be aware of. Here's what we came up with 🧵: 1/

You may have heard of Questionable Research Practices and "HARKing" as threats to replicability. In a new paper led by @sakshighai.bsky.social, we argue that a similar practices -- Questionable Generalizability Practices and "MASKing" -- undermine generalizability. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

So excited to see this in print! A manifesto paving the way for responsible generalisation and co-authorship practices in open science - with an incredible team of scholars! Very much inspired by the benchmark Munafò et al. manifesto for reproducible science www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Across 80 groups, intergroup contact was consistently associated with lower prejudice. The type of group and type of contact did not matter.

New research alert! Our study investigates the effectiveness of human-only, AI-assisted, and AI-led teams in assessing the reproducibility of quantitative social science research. We've got some surprising findings!

Changing our behaviour isn't easy–and changing the behaviour of others is even harder. Here is a great analysis of 19 behavioural principles we proposed that are rooted in decades of research. What works and what doesn't when it comes to changing behavior: www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Our Missing Majority in Behavioral Science Dashboard now displays how different journals from psychology and economics fare over time in terms of first-author representativeness across continents. Check out the journals from your field to see how they're performing!

Very heavily updated preprint with Tessa Charlesworth and Patrick Mair on international trends in explicit and implicit social group attitudes (2009–2019) using 1.4 million+ participants from 33 countries in the @projectimplicit.bsky.social International Dataset: psyarxiv.com/jmg7c/.

In 2021, the average CEO at America’s top 350 companies took home 399 times more money than the respective corporation’s average employee. Such extreme inequality triggers class identity. This is what commentators like Ben Shapiro and others seem to miss. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/what-ben-s...

{effectsize} version 1.0.0 has been released! 🍕👹 Not many changes in this update, but his is quite a milestone 🥳 - the second stable package from @easystats.bsky.social, with more to come soon! #rstats easystats.github.io/effectsize/

One new feature is how `export_table()` can deal with very wide tables. `export_table()` is used by almost every `print()` method throughout easystats packages. Whenever you have text-output in the console or markdown documents, you can be (almost) sure you won't see messy tables anymore...

The first stable #easystats release is there! Our "workhorse" package, which builds the foundation of the easystats-ecosystem, has been released in version 1.0.0 on CRAN. Probably not the package users use most, it's rather doing its work silently in the background... easystats.github.io/insight/

#statstab #225 An introduction to identifying statistical outliers in R with {easystats} Thoughts: Everyone knows outliers are detected by a z-score > 3! But if you wanna be "modern" try the {performance} pkg. #outliers #r #rstats #bias #zscores #robusr link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Hard at work advancing the @easystats.bsky.social ecosystem! In-person meetings of the easystats team are rare but cherised

The best ideas always come when free spirits meet around some beers and a desire for creatively pushing the boundaries of what's possible! 🍻