🚨New in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... Genetic principal components (PCs) are commonly used to adjust for population stratification in genetic studies. In this paper, we quantify how much direct genetic signal is lost when using these “catch-all” adjustments. 🧵

One of the loveliest books I’ve read this year. By @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social. Highly recommend to anyone who loves the craft of writing but also feels terribly insecure. The writing-specific advice is unexpectedly relevant for researchers. The big pictures perspectives are priceless.

agreed! best time to care about emotions and affect and neuroscience as a sociologist!

Exciting times for affective sociology!

2 years after schools ban smartphones, subjective wellbeing is higher by .5 SD and attention is *lower* by the same magnitude. Puzzling.

Very excited to read this!

These sessions look really cool. Regretting missing PAA this year.

Family demographers, need recommendations for #PAA2026 sessions? 1/3 📅 Thursday, May 7 | 9:30–10:45 AM Experimental Methods in Studying Union Formation and Dissolution (@yiangli.bsky.social & I curated four excellent papers using #experimental methods to address key questions in #family #demography)

A big study that was cited as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted: www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-wi... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Apologies for any misinterpretation on my part. I was just responding to this earlier post by you where I thought you meant that “the whole project of [behavioral genetics] was intellectually flawed”. Sorry if I misunderstood you.

I’m very surprised by these comments. I genuinely enjoyed this book. Even if one was skeptical about the proportion of variance explained by genes (no one’s reasonably going to argue that it’s zero), I thought she poses interesting questions that we all should be thinking about.

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

#GenderRoles Cumulated #ISSP #Data on “#Family and Changing Gender Roles” out now! ISSP 1988/1994/2002/2012/2022 – “Family and Changing Gender Roles I-V – Cumulation” doi.org/10.4232/1.14750#GenderRoles#ISSP#Data#Familyor the first time, there is now a cumulated dataset on this topic that combines data from all five waves!

Americans are more polarized in their trust in scientists than in virtually any other societal institution. — James N. Druckman. (@umisrcps.bsky.social) More, via Opinion Today: opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260420-top...

This looks like something we should worry about a lot.

I am one of the co-organizers of this event, and there has been some upset about it elsewhere on Bluesky. I cannot speak from anybody's perspective other than my own about this, but will express my own position briefly here. 1/X

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

New paper documenting a negative association between childhood exposure to local wealth inequality and inter-class social ties in adulthood. If children have fewer chances to meet peers from different class backgrounds, those divides may persist far beyond childhood.

What can large-scale studies tell us about reproducibility? In our webinar on April 16, researchers from COS, I4R, and META-REP will discuss findings from three papers—one from the recently published SCORE effort—and insights on reproducibility, transparency, and credibility cos-io.zoom.us/webin...

Finally this long-last meta-research is done! We examine the demographics of subject from 1000 Chinese psych journal articles & 27 big-teams science. Findings: these participant are not representative of the 🇨🇳population, in terms of sex, age, & edu. @btscon.bsky.social @sakshighai.bsky.social

Three recent papers examined reproducibility of a large sample of findings. Join this webinar to discuss them and explore where the findings converge and differ. 1. SCORE: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 2. I4R: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 3. Meta-Rep: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Come join us! We have two research coordinator positions open with the Stanford IRISS predoctoral program, a program designed to mentor students for graduate study: LEVANTE: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p... BabyView: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p... (deadline 5/1)

How do we know if research is credible? In Abatayo et al., 86 of us combined evidence across the SCORE program including replicability, reproducibility, robustness, human and machine assessments to understand relationships among many potential credibility measures. 1/ Paper: osf.io/preprints/me...

Very curious about the results

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...