In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...

I think this was instantly obvious to most people doing much online research in Nov of 2022, right? There were full-on papers about it by the spring of 2023. The only reason I don’t see this as forcing pysch back to n=50 undergrads per semester is that they’ll just treat synthetic samples as proxies

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence 1/

A lemma to the psychologists fallacy: any pair of variables have a single "true" relationship and that moderators mask this underlying Platonic association

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

I really do not get the general urge among online academics to dunk on X area for discovering what Y area has known for decades. There are many reasons why this is unscholarly. To name a few: 1. Most scientists don't perform interdisciplinary research because it's explicitly disincentivized.

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The reason this is a nonsense defense: arxiv.org/abs/2407.08790

New paper in Synthèse. Open access.

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

New paper. TLDR: Social power influence a person’s ability to establish the question under discussion in a conversation. Combining work in formal pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social epistemology can help us identify the mechanisms by which this happens. philpapers.org/rec/MALIIX

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but this being the biggest story in the world at present really speaks to how much Twitter still serves as a universal assignments editor for English-language journalists.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

Correct me if I'm wrong but if insurance companies are going to be facing increased risk in some areas of the country as a result of absolutely moronic choices by the local majorities wouldnt they also be...pricing that risk into the premiums we pay in the rest of the country? so, I'll pay more bc

What are your pros/cons of using AI in science? Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.

great title link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Despite all the silly AGI hype, the miracle of what AI *can* do remains underappreciated. I had to move my blog from a Movable Type site (Typepad RIP) to a Wordpress site. After support from one hosting company failed to help me, I found a different site and GPT5 guided me through every single step

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate. Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

I think it's a mistake to frame this as all about zero-sum thinking. People accept big losses to punish unfair behavior, and rampant inequality makes it easy to convince them that *someone* is cheating. The "who" can be alliance-based, and subject to propaganda. In resource-sharing exps...🧵

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 🧵 A thread:

"Political brokers use social networks to identify & target reciprocal non-copartisans for vote buying. Parties recruit brokers central in networks to sway persuadable voters." From @rduartegonzalez.bsky.social, Finan, @hlarreguy.bsky.social and Schechter: www.restud.com/brokering-vo... #Econsky

I have been thinking a lot lately about this, because if you put Mamdani next to Jasmine Crockett next to that new Maine oyster fisherman... none of them sound the same. But they all sound like normal people from their communities. "Normal" is regional, you can't decree what it is federally.

the actual communication problem democrats have is this: their most prominent national figures filter everything through focus grouped lines and are incapable of plain speech

Why was Newton so sure that if you just did his optical experiments you’d *have* to believe him about light? Kirsten Walsh, Tom Roberts and I use 4E cognition to suggest an answer. Anachronism? You be the judge… (also i’m real proud of this paper) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... #philsci

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting

Now officially out: "Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models" royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... (by Hu, Sosa, & me)

Just finished reading (the non-technical parts of 😋) this paper by @ang-yu.bsky.social and Felix Elwert. This is conceptually really cool stuff that may also be of interest to psychologists working on group differences, so here's a short 🧵 with my understanding of it:> arxiv.org/abs/2306.16591

Why are young children & older adults more prone to stick to their prior beliefs and/or to be influenced by anchors (e.g., "This costs $500.")? The authors argue it's b/c cognitive processing is more costly for children & older adults, so... doi.org/10.1037/rev0... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

ironically the education for its own sake, Enlightenment-coded, Great Books-ass liberal arts degree is one of the better employment bets you can make. learn how to read, write, think critically, develop curiosity so you can pick up new skills quickly, etc etc

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

Funny thing is - unless you are an expert in an area, it’s tough to tell whether you’re talking to a PhD or just a person who speaks confidently and eloquently about things they know little about.

New blog post inspired by my 5yo's most recent library book: asking an LLM for help is kind of like asking Amelia Bedelia for help! AKA, why the range of tasks where using AI is worth your time is probably a lot narrower than you think. rchrdsnemory.github.io/site/blog/20...

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

European countries that subtitle rather than dub English-language TV content have better English skills. This paper argues the effect is causal and large: www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo...

A perfect URL does not exi... 😃 #rstats 🔗 rstats.wtf

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

Hit me people, I want to see how quickly I run out of opinions

🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social! We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery. 📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...

My advisor has an effect named after him. I want that too now. The problem is I'd have to achieve something and I don't wanna do that. Suggestions? jonathanweisberg.org/post/zollman/

There’s something funny about saying that someone caused something to happen when they didn’t act intentionally — as if that phrasing assigns unintended agency to them. Why is that? In this new paper below, we take a linguistic approach to answering this question. Lots of interesting data here!