I have a good feeling that 2026 is finally going to be our year!..

Oliver Sacks has always been one of my favorite writers, & I've tried to emulate him for a long time. However, anyone who has spent any real effort trying to translate their real-world experience into a compelling narrative knows how unstructured, anticlimactic, and uninteresting reality really is.

"ai is inevitable" is a high accuracy indicator of "I am a sucker"

Code red.... Does anyone know a not-by-hand hack to grade 493 scantrons without a scantron machine? ⚰️

But for real, I think my wife has legit won this game... ⚰️

ManuscriptCentral Wrapped! In 2025, you submitted 5 papers AND all got rejected 🎉 You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers! You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️

I think I now have a much better understanding of why these dorks are so impressed by ChatGPT.

My former honors student RA (who co-authored a paper with us as an undergrad!) is reporter for the ABC News Medical Unit and a prolific NYC health journalist. It's very gratifying to be a way station on folk's journey through success. Here's his latest: abcnews.go.com/US/whooping-...

I'm as happy as the next person that Bass Pro Shops is now a fashion statement, but I already miss all the Carhartt.

If you are on the editorial board of a journal and you haven't reviewed a paper for that journal in over 1000 days and you get sent a request to review and you decline that request and you don't even have the courtesy to recommend other reviews.... you shouldn't be on that editorial board.

... and a faculty meeting is less a Council of Elrond than it is an HOA.

A university committee is a gathering of important people who individually can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Spotted on LinkedIn... a bad AI summary of our new paper on risks of AI in research. Please make it stop.

📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly 🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ

Hell hath no fury like the inbox of the professor of a 500 student (mostly freshman) intro class when AWS causes Canvas to go down on the day an assignment is due and on the week of their first exam.

New tenure track faculty position in glia and/or neurovascular coupling! Please come join us! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30864 #neurosky #neuroskyence #glia #neurojobs

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw

Everyone keeps stealing my bit!

Every time I post on LinkedIn, know that a little part of my soul just died (...and the rest I already sold to Microsoft to boost productivity and identify actionable insights for stakeholders).

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Last Friday, Curtis Phills and I ran our first conference! Introducing CODES. The Consortium of Oregon Diversity and Equity Scholars! We were excited to bring together folks across Oregon who do diversity science work. We need community more than ever. Hope we can continue this in future years...

I’m admitting 1–2 Ph.D. students to join my lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder, starting Fall 2026. We study person perception, stereotyping and prejudice, and intervention science. Application info: www.colorado.edu/psych-neuro/... Lab info: www.svmlab.org

University of Colorado Boulder Psychology & Neuroscience is searching for TWO tenure track assistant professors!! jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta... #socialpsychology #cogpsyc #PsychSciSky #PsychJob #psycjobs #psychology 1/n

Me just realizing our Fall term starts in a week..

If you can't be bothered to read, why are trying to be a scientist. Baffling...

"To the degree that these tools are saving time and energy, I am not seeing researchers reinvest those savings into developing a deeper understanding of their subject matter, making connections to new ideas, or otherwise investing in advancing their current skillset." Wonderful essay.

My latest piece, on apprenticeship, artificial intelligence, and intrinsic motivation. Handcrafted from the heart. Please, share and enjoy. open.substack.com/pub/robchave...

Cognitive Dissonance: When you rename it "Department of War", while pouting that you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

A lady at the coffee shop this morning asked me if the gray in my hair was real or if I dyed it that way to look cool... ⚰️

After 5 years, I finally carved out time to turn this blog post on FDR (markallenthornton.com/blog/fdr-pro...) into a manuscript. The preprint features a much broader range of simulations showing how FDR promotes confounds, and how this effect compounds with publication bias: osf.io/preprints/ps...

If this is like brain imaging, in a few years it will mean people with a genuine interest in these topics will be doing harder work with fewer rewards while being left to clean up the mess of social psychology trend-chasers & careerists looking for a magic methodological shortcut that doesn't exist.

New policy: if you want to complain about PsyArxiv (a free service that didn’t exist 15 years ago), you must sign up to be a moderator.

We’re searching for a Developmental Neuroscientist! Building on UO’s rich tradition in the field, we’re excited to welcome the next scientist to carry it forward.

Lest we let PsyArXiv become full of more stuff like this...

The dearth of reviewers for papers often overlooks the expertise of lesser-known ECRs. If you know an ECR with expertise in neuroimaging, individual differences, and/or social cognition who is interested in reviewer experience for Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, please reach out to me!

In advance of next year's (likely dire) job market, here are the 2024-2025 numbers from the psych job wiki: the overall number of tenure-track job listings in psychology and neuroscience fell slightly, from 860 to 822 (this doesn't include canceled searches, which are often not properly reported).

I often hear the Thomas Insel quote about not moving the needle on mental health from the NIH ... I hear much less about the APA being a waterboarding-sanctioning relic of a different era who also hasn't moved that needle in any meaningful way. www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/u...

The finest of lines divide the hypercapitalist influencer grifting of LinkedIn from the bigoted troll-bots of Xitter.

Latest paper is finally out today! This paper originally started as a project with one of my former undergrads while I was in grad school. I am especially fond of this paper because it's all about Hawaii, and I got to incorporate a lot of historical frameworks. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XRQWC...

Life in US academia this year..

The AI hype makes doing science so much more difficult. Fighting its nonsense takes time away from doing science and its uncritical adoption hollows out our scientific processes and deskills scientists on a massive scale.

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the latest episode of #UndertheCortex, Robert Chavez from @uoregon.bsky.social shared that our brains use two systems to encode people (allocentric and egocentric), and these systems help us organize social memory and navigate our relationships with others.

"I don't want to be a curmudgeon! I like tech and I just want to do tech stuff without constantly having to call bullshit on AI nonsense... It's exhausting to deal with credulous magical thinking from decision-makers who should know better." www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-...

It was fun talking to folks at @psychscience.bsky.social Under the Cortex podcast about our recent paper on person knowledge reference frames, their brain mechanisms, and my general approach to our science. Red hot interdisciplinary action! open.spotify.com/episode/0YIp...

"When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning." deplet.ing/the-copilot-...

I didn't know her, but I loved her writing and thinking. RIP. helendecruz.substack.com/p/on-playing...

Ragtag 1980s mestizaje family in Socorro, New Mexico...

11yo Daughter: Light joke tailored to my interests. Pure, clever sweetness. 8yo Son: Our cat peeing on a hippo (my favorite animal) who is also peeing while they both eat lettuce. Unhinged chaotic sweetness. ❤️❤️