New newsletter. I couldn't get this survey result from 2016 out of my head, so I wrote about it https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/when-half-the-population-dont-trust

Monday boost: The costs of being open-minded https://mastodon.online/@tomstafford/115275194235549664

New newsletter! https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-costs-of-being-open-minded

New newsletter! https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-costs-of-being-open-minded

"In short, the OpenAI paper inadvertently highlights an uncomfortable truth: the business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations. Until these incentives change, hallucinations will persist." […]

Anyone a substack power user? I have a very specific question https://substack.com/@tomstafford/note/c-159712524 #substack

Anyone a substack power user? I have a very specific question https://substack.com/@tomstafford/note/c-159712524 #substack

Updated my behavioural science "Experiment Design Checklist" https://tomstafford.github.io/psy-checklist/ Enjoy! #cogsci #psychologyresearch

The real risk of generative AI is a crisis of knowledge Universities are often focusing on new technologies’ impact on assessment, but for Joshua Thorpe there are more fundamental questions about how these tools will affect students’ identities as learners […]

#cambridge, UK, until Wednesday!

The Intelligence is in the User https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-is-in-the-user Today's newsletter, on ways we underestimate how much user skill goes into getting good results from AI models #genai #cogsci #llms #chatgpt

Love that you can browse the current river level and see a 36-hour predictive model I salute the #ukgov infrastructure nerds who built this https://check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk/station/8248 #sheffield #rain #riverdon

The Intelligence is in the User https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-is-in-the-user Today's newsletter, on ways we underestimate how much user skill goes into getting good results from AI models #genai #cogsci #llms #chatgpt

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of listening to Dorothy Bishop emphasize the responsibility of editors during the 12th PCI Webinar! If you weren't able to join, you can catch her talk and the following Q&A session at this link: https://youtu.be/0NJ87tYE8_s

Quote tweets on the fediverse https://mastodon.social/@inconceivable/115087249526661249

cuando me preguntan que por qué no me voy a bluesky

PODCAST Normal Curves The Backfire Effect: Can fact-checking make false beliefs stronger? https://www.normalcurves.com/the-backfire-effect-can-fact-checking-make-false-beliefs-stronger/ tl;dr - NO, it can't. But this is a great discussion of the evidence and how researchers have changed their […]

New newsletter. I cross the #DecisionMaking and #Metascience streams and write about recent work we've been doing at the @RoRInstitute https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/distributed-peer-review It's the academic equivalent of those video […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

Interventions to reduce vaccine hesitancy among adolescents: a cluster-randomized trial https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02306-2 Tested ready-to-use pedagogical activities against a chatbot. Both affected attitudes towards, and knowledge of […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

New newsletter. I cross the #DecisionMaking and #Metascience streams and write about recent work we've been doing at the @RoRInstitute https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/distributed-peer-review It's the academic equivalent of those video […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

Reliability, bias and randomisation in peer review: a simulation https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4gqce_v1 new preprint from UKRI #metascience Unit

Uploads to @PsyArXiv climbing back up, after the dip in response to the move to pre-moderation https://mastodon.social/@PAXscraper/115181741815702122

Day 10 of my career break and I am enjoying myself immensely. Writing every morning is definitely part of that, but so is the guilt free ability to do just as I feel with my time. https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/some-personal-news #academicchatter

Well, it's 9am — the moment in every day when I gather all this anger, disgust and heaviness of heart into a pile, wave 🪄✨ a magic wand and convert it into a sense of challenge, purpose, and resolution. Thank god for magic wands.

ARMA Research Evaluation SIG Drop-In Session: Randomisation in funding allocation https://arma.ac.uk/product/arma-research-evaluation-sig-drop-in-session-randomisation-in-funding-allocation/ Online, 6th of October. - I will speak on the work we do at […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

Monday bump, in case you missed it: https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/how-to-outsmart-a-crowd-of-5000-people #psychology #cogsci

Reliability, bias and randomisation in peer review: a simulation https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4gqce_v1 New preprint from UK Metascience Unit argues that randomisation of proposal selection will necessarily reduce sensitivity to proposal quality

From ‘Great Awakening’ to sending death threats: A study of police-recorded crimes driven by conspiracy theories in the Netherlands https://doi.org/10.1177/14773708251351728 Dutch crime reports for 2019-2022: " we found 194 crimes that show a clear […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

Monday bump, in case you missed it: https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/how-to-outsmart-a-crowd-of-5000-people #psychology #cogsci

"What is your greatest strength as an employee?" https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3454 Classic SMBC from @ZachWeinersmith

Congratulations to @WIRED for catching their AI-written article, retracting it, and publishing a candid 𝘮𝘦𝘢 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘱𝘢." https://www.wired.com/story/how-wired-got-rolled-by-an-ai-freelancer/ Have any academic journals done that? #ai #LLMs #scholcomm

Doh! Clicked publish on tomorrow's post by accident. So it is now today's post https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/how-to-outsmart-a-crowd-of-5000-people

Julia Roher on Mediation Analysis https://www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/reviewer-notes-thats-a-very-nice-mediation-analysis-you-have-there-it-would-be-a-shame-if-something-happened-to-it/ "The central concern is that claims about mediation are causal claims. We claim that some cause X affects an […]

From the archive (April 2020): I wrote about productive epsitemic environments and the glory days of blogging culture https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/thinking-in-public

Personal news! I'm taking a career break, planning to write more and do some consultancy (first gig: work with @RoRInstitute ). Read all about it https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/some-personal-news And let me know if you've any good ideas for adventures

"I have been scammed in my qualitative research" https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-025-00179-7 Bandiera et al (2025) report fraudulent research participants using AI tools to pretend to be part of the relevant study population

Move to pre-moderation at PsyArXiv seems to be having an effect https://mastodon.online/@[email protected]/115127959365297017

Now we have quote-tweets I can do this to bump the link for Saturday's newsletter https://mastodon.online/@tomstafford/115116838398899345

Did you buy a bottle of wine from Tescos in the UK between August and October 2019? Is so, your choice may be one of the 3,649,027 purchases which informs this analysis of cognitive bias in shopping https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-025-00341-2

New newsletter! https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/decoy-effects-in-the-purchase-of #cogsci #bias #economics

Mariusz Lewandowski “Soul Hunter” (2015), 40 x 50 centimeters https://migurski.tumblr.com/post/791814978461106176

Distributed Peer Review : Democratising funding evaluation https://researchonresearch.org/democratising-funding-evaluation-can-slash-the-time-it-takes-to-deliver-a-final-decision-by-over-50/ New work from myself, the team at @RoRInstitute and the Volkswagen Foundation, evaluating their trial […]

Quote tweets on the fediverse https://mastodon.social/@inconceivable/115087249526661249

I'm putting together a short bibliography of recent papers about #BigTeamScience, with emphasis on challenges and solutions for large social science projects. Am I missing any important papers? I'm in particular looking for any tools or checklists to use when […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

A new report on using AI to support consensus between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders. https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/algorithmically-enhanced-consensus "To approach this hardest of hard tasks, they designed a process with human discussion at the core, but supported by computer […]

A new report on using AI to support consensus between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders. https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/algorithmically-enhanced-consensus "To approach this hardest of hard tasks, they designed a process with human discussion at the core, but supported by computer […]

New newsletter! In a break from recent posts on understanding generative AI, I review a recent paper: Using collective dialogues and AI to find common ground between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders (Konya et al, 2025). https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/algorithmically-enhanced-consensus

"At each point the language model has done nothing more than make the next move in the conversation game. Like a good improviser it has formed no commitment beyond being consistent with what has gone on before, helping to continue the current scene." […] [Original post on mastodon.online]