Ideologically rating social science academic article abstracts (using a fixed contemporary ideological scale) finds that 90% lean left & all disciplines showed leftward movement from 1990-2024, especially on cultural issues. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Useful lessons in building self-efficacy. This applies to really any programming language. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Interesting paper. I’ve always wondered about the role of selection into bad jobs.

1/ Has life expectancy fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic? In a new pre-print, we find that 31 of 34 high-income countries had still not returned to their expected life expectancy trajectories five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #demography

Mismatch of preference for + lack of control over work location (a.k.a. "workplace captivity") predicts lower job and life satisfaction. Becoming "captive" additionally accompanies higher psychological distress. doi.org/10.1177/0190...

We have written a simple, plain-language, no equations & minimal jargon tutorial for experimentalists on why you can't drop people who don't take your treatments or follow your instructions. with re-analyses & recommendations! with @samanthajamesbrown.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps... #psych

NYU is hiring two postdocs at the Center for Social Media, AI & Politics: csmapnyu.org/jobs And a grant manager in Sociology with the Social Science Research Hub: uscareers-nyu.icims.com/jobs/15327/g... I'm part of both groups--please share with anyone who is interested!

Happy to share our new paper published in PNAS! Using epigenetic clocks and egocentric network data, we find each additional "hassler" in your close social network is associated with ~9 months of extra biological age and 1.5% faster pace of aging.

SPQ is excited to announce a Special Issue on Social Status! We are inviting scholars to submit their theoretical and empirical articles that examine status by December 15th, 2026. Below is the information for the Call for Papers. #SPQ

A counterintuitive example where a strong prior pulls an estimate in the wrong direction–and how to see the problem statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/02/a...

Is academia a job, career, or calling? Yes, yes, and yes. The answer is not defined by the role, it is defined by the person in the role. It is perfectly acceptable to decide it is any of these for one's interests and well-being, and to live and work accordingly.

After 5 years I can finally share a full WP of our project conducting cognitive interviews of life satisfaction reporting. Main findings: 1. LS scales are psychometrically valid, but... 2. Standard statistical assumptions made when analysing LS data are not credible. osf.io/gv5e3/files/...

People who grew up in a high SES families have virtually no association b/w anxiety PGI & anxiety symptoms. But childhood SES did not moderate the association between depression PGI & depressive symptoms. [US sample of older adults] www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project. Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months. Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Writing is thinking Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

Within-twin differences in birthweight are assoc. w/ cognitive ability in midlife, but b/w family differences is in birthweight are not. Authors think this is because nutritional differences (within twin) affect development differently than other prenatal exposures (e.g. maternal smoking).

The young report lower job quality than other workers in the USA potentially contributing to their declining mental health. But other factors (employment selection and changing work orientations) may be at play www.nber.org/papers/w34696 @sriucl.bsky.social @dannyblanchy.bsky.social

Who is the Big Tobacco of today? In new work, we find 50% of high profile social media papers are connected to big tech through funding, collaboration and employment. Most connections aren't disclosed. @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @jevinwest.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com 1 arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

1/ Does growing up poor always lead to political apathy? Very happy to share my first paper published (open access) in @electoralstudies.bsky.social, where I show that parents' influence mitigates the poverty gap in participation, while economic mobility does not. 🔗 shorturl.at/p5Bac

"For first-generation, low-income students, ... better well-being is uniquely and consistently linked to similarity and academic support in their friend networks." Paywall: doi.org/10.1177/0146...

This paper looks extremely interesting. Nice work!

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:

Cool twin study design!

This is an amazing use of AI!

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

In 2026, I am launching a vlog, For the Love of Science, about working aspects of being a scientist - the joys and challenges, the practical aspects and mental and emotional qualities it involves. It's on YouTube (at @NAChristakis) and Instagram (at @OnTheLoveofScience) www.youtube.com/@NAChristakis

Interesting discussion about whether it’s fair game to feed public domain works into an LLM without authors’ consent.

Is one of your goals for 2026 to write more? One question I get all the time is, "How do you make time to write?" So, here is my unsolicited writing advice for the new year:

Effect sizes in social science survey experiments are typically small, requiring large samples and budgets for sufficient statistical power. It gets even trickier because increasing n/$ yields only diminishing returns to statistical power. This study points to an important barrier to credibility👇 1/

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

Very much agree. If science behaves anyway close to what Kuhn understood it to be (paradigms, normal science, etc), then LLMs would be particularly bad at discerning the quality of contributions that don’t fit standards of practice, both very good and very bad.

My new book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, is now shipping! A brief summary of the argument to follow…

Appreciated this point: “there’s the ethically or methodologically corrupt core and then the larger group of influencers who promote things when they should know better...” Social media could be much more useful if folks didn’t promote articles they haven’t yet taken the time to carefully read.

Good advice!

More evidence of Matthew effect within siblings.

I'm facilitating a causal inference reading group next semester for Sociology PhD students. (I will also be learning!) If there are (1) pedagogical articles or (2) empirical examples in soc that you ❤️, will you share in the comments? [And please RT to help me crowd-source!]

Interesting essay. I struggle to understand how we can jump from something advanced autocomplete to feeling emotions. But that is not far from how sociologists already think about the socialization in humans.

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Multiverse analyses require thorough, theory-based model selection. Otherwise, they become a ‘dangerous tool’ that drowns valid models in misspecified ones, needlessly eroding trust in science.” A plea for thoughtful models by @kauspurg.bsky.social #MetaSci

Happy to see Madison featured in NYT! Although Madison is an objectively beautiful place, it is really the prosocial and friendly culture of this city that make it so special. If you have more than 36 hours, visit the state parks nearby. WI camping (esp in autumn) is a surreal experience.

At the blog, I wrote about two very interesting recent methods articles - Inference to the Best Explanation and External/Construct Validity. Very thoughtful pushback against the ascendancy of the credibility revolution. asocial.substack.com/p/inequality... Hope you enjoy!

Findings are entirely selection

A big flaw with this recent “AI increases research success” study. The study did NOT directly compare researchers who used vs didn’t use AI. What they found is people who used words like “significant” & “groundbreaking“ more had bigger success. Maybe they just had success bc results were better?

This is the list of words that is used to identify Chat-GPT use in this paper. Among this list are the words: "significant", "profound", "groundbreaking", and "revolution[ary?]".

In academia, the pinnacle of achievement is a pdf no one can access and I think that's beautiful

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social) Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Will Joy-Adjusted Life Years (JALYs) become widely adopted health-outcome measures? * * I seem to recall @davidmcutler.bsky.social years ago making reference to jogging-adjusted life years, so the JALY acronym may already be claimed. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/w...