🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

This too…

Just an aside: 41 of the 100 meta analyses published in Psych Bull between 2023 and 2025 do not include *any* quality screening of identified studies. To the degree that those literatures include bad studies, they are being laundered together with the good ones.

Positive and negative self-esteem are two (or one?) such offenders that I cover in my blog post. www.the100.ci/2023/06/13/d...

Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life. A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need. Fascinating!

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🚨STOP, replication time!🚨 Does Feeling “Right” Make the Good More Good (and the Bad More Bad)? Achar & Lee found that when people experience regulatory fit, moral predispositions get amplified—moral folks act more moral, less moral folks act less moral. Big, exciting claim!

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Does “feeling right”—that is, experiencing regulatory fit—lead us to act more in line with our moral preferences? With @schildchristoph.bsky.social and @stepf.bsky.social, we conducted a series of the first large-scale, independent close replications in the field of regulatory fit.

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

"We will call the 12th month of the year 'December'... which means 'tenth month.'"

Sharp analysis on why 'Why $100,000 Is the New Poor' www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

At ZPID we are searching for a tenure track assistant professor for Psychological Metascience in joint appointment with @unitrier.bsky.social preferably someone who has conducted quantitative research in metascience in psychology or related disciplines. Questions? Feel free to contact me personally.

The only positive news about this paper is that this development may incentive social scientist to go out and talk to people again

Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!! Goodness gracious.

In our rejoinder, we argue 1) Dark terminology isn't used responsibly as BL et al. claim, 2) the term can be replaced with a more sensible and scientific one, 3) data support our position (Stanton et al., 2025), and 4) popularity ≠ importance. @davidchester.bsky.social @drlynam.bsky.social

Proud to have signed letter from 600+ economists & inequality experts from 70 countries supporting the call for a new Independent Panel on Inequality- an Inequality IPCC- to tackle the inequality emergency- G20 leaders must support this. #G20SouthAfrica www.independent.co.uk/news/south-a...

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title. If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing. I can tell you what I think of that for free. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

📊 now in English @fesonline.bsky.social: Gender gap in voting behavior in Germany📊 It's about the “big picture” since 1953 & current trends 2021-2025. The gender gap keeps growing, especially among the young. -> Longer trends are continuing & partly accelerating. library.fes.de/pdf-files/a-...

Who did this?!

We read the (in)famous Bem Feeling the Future JPSP paper for a "spooky" Halloween lab meeting and it was fabulous!! I couldn't get over the wild methodological issue where they type of psychic power he founded depended on what random number generator Bem used 😂

Now out in Party Politics 🎉 Our study (@jbpilet.bsky.social)suggests that when a mainstream right-wing party signals willingness to rule with the radical right, support for the radical right rises — while the mainstream gains nothing. 👉 A legitimisation effect. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality. This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀 diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions! Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.

Life satisfaction mostly declines with age. Previous findings (esp. the famous U-shaped age-SWB trajectory) were artifacts of misspecified models. doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

Meta

What a cool format! 🎓 I had a great time as the opponent at Thekla Müller-Boysen’s PhD defense @au.dk. It was a strong defense and made for a fun discussion on boredom & its interpersonal consequences. Huge thanks to @stepf.bsky.social & team for the invite 🙏

Mehr #Chancengleichheit — Die soziale Mobilität im Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich gering und weiter stark gesunken. Das ist ungerecht, bremst die Wirtschaft und gefährdet die Demokratie. #Generationenvertrag Meine Kolumne bei Die Zeit: www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2...

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!

Quick, which decade had the best movies, music, TV & fashion? Americans don't agree on the decade. But they often say it was a decade they experienced as a school aged kid. For example, the best fashion & music happened in their teenage years. Do you agree? www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Research by @sergiopirla.bsky.social et al (N=60k across 30 countries) suggests a robust negative association between daily experiences of boredom and income; in lower income individuals, boredom is also more closely linked with sadness, worry and anxiety: buff.ly/S1ez2xo

An international call for action just got louder: Today, 7 Nobel Laureates have issued a powerful call for a minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy in Le Monde Here’s a quick breakdown of the debate—and where things stand globally 🧵 www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

New paper out in JESP with Thekla Müller-Boysen and @stepf.bsky.social We used three modified versions of the dictator game to test whether boredom impacts social preferences (N = 3500). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

Support scholar-controlled diamond open access journals. See freejournals.org, DOAJ, the new European Diamond Capacity Hub, & the Open Journals Collective. A lot is happening in this space! open.lnu.se/index.php/me... @metaror.bsky.social en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJou... nbdt.scholasticahq.com

Just published in @jpube.bsky.social: "Parenthood and the gender gap in commuting" By Aline Bütikofer, René Karadakic, & Alexander Willén www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #econsky #publiceconomics #gendergap

🧵1/ 🚨 New article out! How robust is the psychology of social class? Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries. Published in Nature Human Behaviour: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧨 New draft dropped:🧨 "Cash Transfers, Mental Health and Agency: Evidence from an RCT in Germany" maxkasy.github.io/home/files/p... Companion paper to our paper on basic income and labor supply. Corresponding author Freddie Schwerter (@freddieschwerter.bsky.social). #basicincome #UBI

95% of people underestimate the carbon footprint of the top 1%. When presented with the actual figures, people increase their support for carbon taxes. Our new paper (with Laila Nockur and @stepf.bsky.social) is out in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I was invited to give a talk on open and reproducible science. Sometimes, it is challenging to discuss this topic, so I created The Transparent and Open Science Game. I am sharing here all materials: osf.io/t9ngd

good news about needing to listen to people like Richard Dawkins, though! British people basically don't exist. There are only two nationalities: Chinese and Indian.

Plea to my fellow academics: CITE YOUR SOFTWARE. I'm hearing from several young scholars that they've given up on writing R packages and such because nobody cites them. Yet download stats and rep materials clearly show that they are being used. This is plagiarism, and it slows down innovation

It's finally out! Our large-scaled replication attempt of the induced compliance paradigm in the study of cognitive dissonance: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The latest infuriating thing about this to come to mind: How well did this excuse work for Aaron Swartz and Sci-Hub when they did it for free? How well has it been working for the Internet Archive so far? Why are we only supposed to consider it acceptable when someone’s profiting?