Looking forward to work with @fierycushman.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social on the moral psychology of authority!

Votre article du dimanche soir: l'invention d'un prix Nobel ou le narcissisme académique dans toute sa splendeur. Incroyable enquête de l'Est Républicain www.estrepublicain.fr/faits-divers...

On why the motherhood penalty may be overestimated. Simply put: The identifying variation comes from women having kids at different points in time, which might not be a valid counterfactual. open.substack.com/pub/plausibl...

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations. arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... #AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

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.

What is the meaning of life? 🧪 Some will say "There is none!" But the question has niggled people at least since the The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4000 years ago. It seems having a positive impact on others is key to feeling your life has meaning. www.newscientist.com/article/2513...

Today in that-didn't-happen: Cohen's d = 22. Williams et al. (2014) has 145 citations, putting it in top 1% of most cited psych articles. It is a load-bearing publication in its area, despite having impossible results. pubpeer.com/publications...

Meta-scientists cannot demand transparency from scientists while failing to meet those same standards. In this paper we make one simple recommendation: meta-scientific data should be deanonymised by default.

When you open the dataset and the height of the first participant is 179.5701916 centimetres.

New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem! In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference. www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...

🚨📄 New paper (conditional accepted at @thejop.bsky.social): We test whether social desirability bias actually distorts answers in online surveys. Short version: It mostly doesn’t. w. @timallinger.bsky.social @kristianvsf.bsky.social @morganlcj.bsky.social URL: osf.io/preprints/os...

Very interesting map in the latest @stefanschubert.bsky.social newsletter: www.update.news/p/why-are-so...

We spent months training grad student RAs and GPT-5 mini still beat them by a lot

It's ironic to see a discipline care **so much** about unbiasedness (causal inference!) at the level of a single test but then have a research production system and culture that is basically a ferocious bias generation machine. This is not good.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Can scientist perhaps recognize true signals among all errors? Aurélien thinks this might be the case. Scientists can at least rank order effect sizes, although they are overly positive about the actual effect size.

Now Aurélien Allard with the second talk of #PSE8: How is it possible that there is massive scientific progress, even thought there is a lot of scientific error?

It's like Karl Pearson's old and weird perspective on causation, from his "Grammar of Science" (2nd edition) book: "causation" is when the correlation is perfect. Nowhere does he notice the diff btw prediction and intervention.

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

Un exemple parmi des centaines d'autres de ce que permet cette mise à jour de Gallicagram (bravo l'équipe @bdecourson.bsky.social!): De la place centrale de @mediapart.fr dans le travail journalistique de traitement et de publicisation des violences sexuelles en France

🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴 Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout ! 📌 www.gallicagram.com

In what seems like another life, I tried to convince participants that birds were dinosaurs, and then, pretending to be a different experimenter a few hours later, checked if they had changed how they categorized birds. It ... didn't work. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New blog post, inspired by the excellent recent qualitative paper by Makel and colleagues: On the reliability and reproducibility of qualitative research. I reflect on how I will incorporate realist ontologies in my own qualitative research. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/02/on-r...

Need a bit of happy news in your timeline? I haven’t read the full report yet, but this thread makes me happy. @tomhardwicke.bsky.social @psychscience.bsky.social @i4replication.bsky.social

Feeling some appreciation for @lnalborczyk.bsky.social's logit dot plots (lnalborczyk.github.io/blog/2018-01...).

Cream skimming has been a consistent topic when chatting with friends who work as therapists; I didn't know there was a label for it. I think it's widely known that many therapists pick low-hassle clients (some even explicitly say so) 👀 Which obviously means care won't reach those who most need it.

🧵 New WP with @kaimiele.bsky.social. We document 2 unsettling patterns in mental health care: 1) despite universal coverage, few individuals with mental illness receive guideline-consistent treatment, and 2) the more severe the illness, the lower the treatment uptake & the longer the wait times. 1/n

Academics: If you’re trying to make sense of how people you know knew Epstein, it’s book agent John Brockman. He’s savvy enough to lay low, but we should be talking about him. Friends don’t let friends sign with Brockman. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete... And newrepublic.com/article/1548...

Do ordinary Republicans and Democrats really avoid each other in everyday life? In a new working paper with Delia Baldassarri, we present descriptive and experimental evidence to challenge the view that partisanship drives the formation of social relationships. osf.io/preprints/so... 1/15

Now out in @nataging.nature.com: Exposure to low-credibility online health content is limited and is concentrated among older adults www.nature.com/articles/s43... Linking discernment data with exposure from web and YouTube, comparing health vs politics exposure, etc. Lots of good stuff.

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?> With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

🔺 New preprint 🔺 Why does poverty increase time discounting? With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can! A quick 🧵

It's a beautiful plot, but it's terribly misleading about the impact of pre-registration. More recent studies (with higher sample sizes) find very little impact of pre-registration on the publication of null results. Here's a thread with some references (1/N)

But data is available from the authors upon reasonable request. For a meta-research paper this is simply ridiculous Honestly, read our paper more pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35623542/

I always find this image a bit misleading because it focus on the year studies are *published*, not when they are *started*. Here is another version of that figure using the start year of study rather than publication year. Sample sizes in the early 1990s were larger than previous years.

This time I try to explain group-level confounding and some ways to deal with it. Lecture B04 of Statistical Rethinking 2026 - fixed effects, Mundlak machines, latent Mundlak machines, intro to social network analysis and the social relations model. Full lecture list: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Alison Luchs, who has worked at the National Gallery of Art for 47 years, agreed to learn Gen Z slang and make videos because she wanted to raise interest in the museum’s art. She never expected to slay. https://wapo.st/45BXc3S

New preprint 🥳 The city of Leipzig conducts large-scale surveys of adolescents. In 2023, the gender gap in life satisfaction has significantly widened, with girls declining more steeply than boys. What's up with that?> (work with @rmcelreath.bsky.social and @gregork.bsky.social)

A vast array of data suggests that school, not social media, is the biggest modern threat to the mental health of children. If you were recently a child, that won’t be a surprise. If not: enjoy the post :) open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...

Peer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.

C'était un plaisir absolu de discuter avec vous !! 🤩 Discussions passionnantes au rendez-vous. Si vous voulez savoir comment @aurelienallard.bsky.social va sauver la science et découvrir ce qu'est un interrobang, il vous suffit d'un clic !! ⬇️

May be of interest to the reproducibility folks: New tutorial on computational reproducibility for simulation studies just dropped! felipelfv.github.io/Why-risk-it-... by @felipefv.bsky.social, Jason Geller & @brodriguesco.bsky.social

First post of the year, new paper out today: we present possibly the biggest case of systematic Measurement Schmeasurement in tech use. It seems that most studies on gaming (videogame) addiction/disorder haven't measured gaming after all. This research took years, so long 🧵 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

... out of 44 treatment-seekers, 7 agreed to participate so Tiina interviewed them. Our surprise was great when all but one turned out to be *gamblers* -- it was a Heureka moment: the word ‘gaming’ in the leading scale didn’t exclude gambling. Alas, gambling is also a game!

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

See you in Melbourne in Nov 2027, SIPSers and AIMOSers! #metascience

Pour le 3e épisode de Cog Sci, Phil & Chill, nous avons reçu @laudine.bsky.social, post-doc à l'université Wisconsin-Madison, pour nous parler d'inégalités sociales, de politiques de la petite enfance, et d'interrobang ! Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4F4G... Youtube: youtu.be/fgfjgFCx9D0?...

I feel very conflicted about this advice: Can you skip parts of papers? Yes! Reading intro+disc first, and methods only optionally, is completely wrong though. IMHO, intro+disc are often lazy world building. Instead, read the methods first to decide whether the rest is even worth looking at.