What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

That’s why I try to collaborate with everyone. Can’t write a letter against my tenure case now! Checkmate 😏

Are you interested in Shaping an Open Science Culture? Apply for this 2 year post-doc position at UMC Amsterdam. Joeri Tijdink is the PI, but you will work in a large interdisciplinary team (including me). werkenbij.amsterdamumc.org/en/vacatures...

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to see this paper finally out! Really grateful to have been part of such a large international collaboration examining when gratitude interventions do — and don’t — generalize across cultures. 🌎

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Many of us were taught experiments are for testing hypotheses. In Ch 1 of Experimentology, our free, open methods textbook, my coauthors and I argue differently: experiments are for estimating the magnitude of causal effects. This reframing has important consequences. 🧵 experimentology.io

Psychologists: one of humans’ most unique and remarkable characteristics is their social and collaborative nature. Also psychologists: Ew, how dare you collaborate with other researchers?

In 1992 I published an article that had a total of 6 authors (buff.ly/ugnTjMO)& a colleague strongly criticized me for having so many authors. Now, such an author list wouldn't be considered at all unusual by anyone: buff.ly/NOi8JhQ #AcademicSky #highered @nicholascoles.bsky.social #psychology

This website shows you what your browser is leaking about you. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

can the hackers do Manuscript Central next

Just wait until you hear what the scientists say about departments, universities, and the entire institution of science itself 🤣

OSF-induced frustration is one of the most replicable and robust effects to come out of the social sciences over the past decade

Just found this impressive multi-site study on race and social judgment in childhood: really nice work by Mercedes Muñoz and an all-star collaborator team online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

The gap between this and most people is actually hard to fathom. He was running at over 20 km/h for *2 hours*. That's a sprint for most people. And they would only be able to sustain it for a few minutes max. Many couldn't run that fast under any circumstance, let alone for 2 hours straight. Wild

Introducing Datapages, a new project from Mika Braginsky and me. Datapages are open-source templates for creating interactive websites that make research datasets easy to find, explore, and reuse. No coding required for the basic setup. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/04/data...

We are inviting applications for a two-year postdoctoral position in a collaborative meta-science project on the effectiveness of data and code sharing policies in research-performing organizations. www.tue.nl/en/working-a...

#statstab #526 A Meta-Analysis of the Impact and Heterogeneity of Explicit Demand Characteristics Thoughts: The impact of the design on conclusions is under-appreciated #demandcharacteristics #design #methodology #error #bias #metascience #metaanalysis online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

"Demand characteristics can create false positives, false negatives, upward bias, and downward bias." #Methodology #MetaSci

Big team science in my home state of Florida. Awe inspiring but tragic. In a moment of a mass bleaching crisis, 47 researchers across 22 institutions helped document the functional extinction of elkhorn and staghorn corals from Florida's Coral Reef doi.org/10.1126/scie...

**At my funeral** Student: "Will this be on the exam?"

How institutional emails encouraging continued applications for federal grants feel right now:

🌐 New paper at Psych Science Across > 3 million psychology papers, we find that big team science is an emerging trend in psychology—one that is unevenly deployed across world regions to generate high-impact scientific insights. doi.org/10.1177/0956...

🌐 New paper at Psych Science Across > 3 million psychology papers, we find that big team science is an emerging trend in psychology—one that is unevenly deployed across world regions to generate high-impact scientific insights. doi.org/10.1177/0956...

My team has systematically tracked every big team science initiative throughout the history of science. This is a truly momentous and historical achievement. Congrats to the many researchers who worked together to pull it off.

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

Today, the SCORE program releases its primary results! 865 researchers examined research credibility across the social and behavioral sciences, publishing three papers in Nature + five preprints. 📑 Explore the papers: www.nature.com/colle... ℹ️ Read more about SCORE: www.cos.io/score

A new set of papers, sharing the long-awaited result of several reproducibility and replicability projects, including commentaries, is published today. I look forward to reading the studies, and re-using the data generated! www.nature.com/collections/...

Every morning, I wake up and read the obituaries. If my name isn’t in there, I have breakfast. Then, I complete yet another university-mandated training of some sort. This has been my life for 17 years.

What really drives someone to support violent extremism? I am thrilled to share our new article published today in PNAS. Together with an incredible team of collaborators, we conducted a preregistered study across 58 countries with over 18,000 participants. This is what we found.

Honored to receive the APS Rising Star award! 🏆 My nomination focused on “big team science”: collaborations where dozens/hundreds of researchers pursue of a common goal. This dynamic is intensifying in modern AI races. Im here to understand and guide! www.psychologicalscience.org/members/awar...

Sometimes it does make sense to give awards for individual contributions to science. Simine is a force for good, and brings everyone along.

I find it equally useful, fascinating, frightening, and hilarious that I now spend time explaining values to agentic AI

Emotional stimuli in psychology just got a high-tech upgrade. 🚀In our new paper in AMPPS, we introduce and validate the Library of AI-Generated Affective Images (LAI-GAI). We combined generative AI with a rigorous validation pipeline to modernize affect induction procedures.👇

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 🦕

‼️ Postdoc recruitment Want to help build and understand the future of scientific collaboration? We are seeking a postdoc in computational meta‑science. 📍 UF (Gainesville, FL) 💰 $55–60k (1-3 years) 🧠 High intellectual agency 📅 Deadline March 10 Send us your idea. Details attached!

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

OK, Rare Moth Bluesky, you have my attention now. I did look up "rare moths near me" and enjoy reading about Antaeotricha Floridella: a rare sandy-loooing moth thus far only detected in the Florida panhandle!

"Groups of very smart people often behave like a very stupid system" Trying to fit this sentence in a grant, but struggling to think of the most appropriate citation. Perhaps: "see state of world"?

"An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library." Pubpeer, journals are next! theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up. Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

New ethical dilemma: is it better to drown in "meticulous despair" or a sea of bullshit science? IMO, despair is easier to swallow than shit. 😉

🥱 filter |> group_by |> mutate 😏 yeet |> squad_up |> glow_up

Hadley Wickham made a GenZ version of dplyr 😂 hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

people are actually very susceptible to just-so stories about human origins because listening to bullshit helped us survive on the savanna

Why did my brain automatically read that quote in @lakens.bsky.social’s voice 😅

I hate demand characteristics, but many other pre-registered experiments *have* found the effect. We discuss in this meta: online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...