One year later - my reflections on what's happened to US science since the National Science Foundation grant terminations last year. The problem of misinformation isn't going away, but our ability to study and understand it is under attack. 1/ 🧪 www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

Is a 55% replication rate too low, too high, or just right? Some thoughts on Tyner et al.’s (2026) recent study. #MetaSci #PhilSci

The last time I tried to engage with Jay Bhattacharya in dialogue I ended up on administrative leave. 🤷‍♀️

The impact of PhD studies on mental health

Four more days left to apply for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Social Science Collaborartory. For the right candidate, I'm upping the offer: I will double the supply of toy dinosaurs that come with this position 🦕

This post really put together the pieces in a way that floored me. Everything is about to change and we have to confront that reality causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

A great new preprint on the importance of pilot studies for the validity of studies that are performed. Such an important tooic, that is discussed too little. I especially liked the section on the need for transparent reporting. osf.io/t968e_v1 By @yashvin.bsky.social and collaborators.

🚨🚨🚨The Berlin Court of Appeal ruled today that @democracyreporting.bsky.social (DRI) is entitled to publicly available data from X to conduct research on election interference and disinformation on X in connection with the elections in Hungary 🗳️ 🇭🇺 democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU...

(Mic check 1-2-3) I'm on the job market🚨 I’m a social psychologist building computational models to study social cognition, attitudes, polarization, and how people update beliefs. Evidence accumulation models, Hierarchical Bayes, Agent-based models, NLP, etc. Interested in formal theorizing!

Read my latest post for reflections on reproducibility, research quality and a summary of a great new study which shows how NOT to do it https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/gambling-with-research-quality

Why single-item measures of wellbeing are best

"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.” www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Early Christmas present! For the last couple of years, I have been helping to update this textbook for a new edition. I joined a great team that had written the original book, and together we thoroughly revised it and updated it with new research and examples. My copies arrived just the other day!

A thread on a new preprint: "Addressing Demand Artifacts In Psychological Research (And Beyond)".

Thrilled to share this new preprint, co-authored with @peterlush.bsky.social and Chloé Fournier Bernard! We offer a broad and structured discussion of leading methods developed in the past >60 years to tackle demand artifacts in psychological research and beyond. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

In a large, preregistered study (see preprint), we compared InteroMap to emBODY. Overall, InteroMap demonstrated superior construct validity and usability www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Very excited to introduce InteroMap, a new bodily mapping tool designed to measure how we subjectively experience our bodily sensations, what we call interoceptive phenomenology 🧵👇

New publication. Congrats to the whole team, and especially @paulbertin.bsky.social who led this effort. Thanks also to the editor (Nicolas Sommet) and reviewers, who desserve credit for improving our paper.

In this new research, we found that truth beliefs can be successfully conditioned: Statements - true and false - are rated as more true after their pairing with positive than negative pictures. This effect bridges research on evaluative conditioning and misinformation. osf.io/preprints/ps...

This overturns familiar assumptions of perceivers as “cognitive misers” and calls for rethinking how we conceptualize automatic evaluations.

Even with skin tone as a group marker and explicit instructions to form group-based impressions, people relied more on the actual characteristics of the individual they encountered.

In this research, we found that individuating information dominates social group information when forming impressions about members of newly learned social groups. This dominance was observed both on self-reports *and* more automatic measures *despite* conditions favoring group-level impressions.

“52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy” V-Dem data

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

Remarkable thread by Micah Allen here 👇🏼

New article on the potential contribution of experimental demand artifacts to evaluative conditioning effects now published OA in SPPC: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It is amazing that most organizations (businesses, media, NGOs, political parties) that worried about the threat of the far right for decades have spent no time or energy to thinking how to operate in a far right world. They just continue to do the same and are surprised by a different outcome.

New 📰 Demand characteristics are a fundamental methodological concern in research with humans Yet little is known about the magnitude and consistency of these effects In a new paper, I, M. Wyatt, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social take stock of what we’ve learned via meta-analysis doi.org/10.1525/coll...

Very pleased to be featured in the August Editorial for Nature Mental Health! The stomach’s turn: elucidating the gut–brain axis www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📢Excited to share our paper, "Studying unconscious processing: Contention and consensus", published in BBS. The paper is the result of a collaborative effort of 32 leading researchers in the field, from 10 different countries🌏 Check out the full ms👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I find it amusing that ChatGPT can write predictive processing theories that are about as plausible as many published versions. I guess they really are that predictable…

After more than 7 years working on it, I’ve just submitted the manuscript for Discovering Statistics using R second edition. Tonnes more work on website/package and so on, but getting to this stage is monumental psychologically. It’s the book I feared I’d never finish.

New research shows that simply changing how a reaction vessel is positioned on a magnetic stirrer can significantly change a reaction's speed and product quality, influencing the reproducibility of results. #ChemSky #ScienceSky #EduSky

From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science https://go.nature.com/4kIRR01

We may all have thought trade and import tariffs gaf drifted out of the spotlight, but it’s definitely back on the radar. A good time to check out @timharford’s Seven truths about trade—still true, even under 50% tariffs for the EU: buff.ly/6IBO0fH

Economic pressure is a major threat to press freedom. @rsf.org is clear: "The economic indicator on the RSF World Press Freedom Index now stands at an unprecedented, critical low" The global state of #pressfreedom is classified as a 'difficult'. For the first time #WPFD2025 rsf.org/en/rsf-world...

We also recruited “observers” who were matched with the original “actor” participants, shown their choices, and asked to predict the actors’ choice process. Actors were more accurate than observers, suggesting that their accuracy came from some kind of first-person introspection.

Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper at @natcomms.nature.com challenges this view. With @rcarl.bsky.social sky.social, @hedykober.bsky.social y.social, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

My paper on concerns about replicability, theorizing, relevance, generalizability, and methodology across 2 crises is now in press at the International Review of Social Psychology. After revisions it was 17500 words, so it is split in 2 parts: osf.io/dtvs7_v2 and osf.io/g6kja_v1

Honest people don’t lie. Or do they? Liars aren’t honest. Or are they? One puzzling conundrum in contemporary politics is that politicians who seem to be estranged from facts and evidence are nonetheless considered honest by their followers. 1/n

Fifty years from now, there will be a moment of silence to remember some of this.

UK: Brexit is the biggest act of economic self harm any country will ever perform USA: Hold my beer...

Enough internet. Time to cheer myself up by writing about how dark energy will eventually destroy the universe.

So good. 🤡 @brendanvduke.bsky.social

Several countries have recently managed to stop and even reverse the erosion of their democratic institutions. In each case, people resisted growing authoritarianism. This shows that when democracy deteriorates, its fate is not sealed, and democratic institutions can be reclaimed.

How it started // how it's going

Wait till they discover that 'VP' in the Signal group isn't Vance...

74% of Europeans say their country benefits from EU membership—the highest support recorded in 42 years. With peace and security top of mind. 66% want a greater role for Europe in protecting them against global crisis & security risks. We hear you. And we’re ready to deliver. → europa.eu/!3VByd4