Writing simulations in DeclareDesign just went from "I should do that, but it's kind of a lot of work" to extremely easy

Reminder to register (no fee) for the Rebecca Morton experiments conference at NYU taking place next week. Join us: nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Per protocol analysis strikes again! Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

me typing "claude"

*maybe* this journal mistakenly thought the author submitted a registered report (or similar). But if the position is "papers must not be pre-registered" I'd love to hear the justification.

Thank you for all the support and reposts! We've gotten a steady stream of inquiries and submissions for this competition, but also some ANXIETY that the window will close before people have a chance to submit. We're nowhere near that! We'll update on here when we've allocated 50% of the capacity.

Very excited to see this out at @bjpols.bsky.social! In this article, I show that contemporary political news coverage makes it challenging for readers to learn information that is helpful for democratic accountability, even for very politically engaged audiences. A brief summary:

Penelope Van Grinsven and Lilly Zuckerman curate Above Board Ceramics -- this year's show is now live and is fabulous. www.aboveboardceramics.com [disclosure Penny and I are married!]

highly recommend this paper. the experimental design manipulates how much subjects are monitored; when asked, yes treated subjects feel more monitored. Do they later give different responses on possibly sensitive topics? no they don't.

Interesting paper, especially interesting it's coming from researchers at Anthropic arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Among the most vivid declines in the American people's trust -- their diminished trust in other people. Data from @gallup.com's Social Series.

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

After years in academia, I’m exploring data science and research roles in industry. I'm a quant. social scientist (PhD Yale ’24, NYU) focused on causal inference, experiments, and large-scale data. Feel free to get in touch or share; all leads appreciated. [email protected]

JOIN us for this year’s Rebecca Morton conference on experimental political science at NYU! March 6-7. We have a great line up of papers and posters! Program (scroll down) here: wp.nyu.edu/cesspolitica... Register (no fee) here: nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Many of us separate between "family photos", social media (e.g., FB/Insta), and political opinions (BS/Threads). Today is a good time to post on "family" social media so our Trump-voting family and friends understand how mad we are, and to puncture their information bubble.

The section is searching for new editors for @jepsjournal.bsky.social ! Please check out the call here, and circulate widely: connect.apsanet.org/s42/editor-s...

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

new vox dev piece on our recent RCT to counter misinformation in classrooms in india:

RIP. Learned so much from this community. Here's my best-performing SO question. stackoverflow.com/questions/28...

Coauthors Liz Sperber, O’Brien Kaaba and I have published 3 papers about youth civic ed and political participation, based on a WhatsApp experiment and a prior in-person pilot conducted in collaboration w/ Caritas Zambia CCMG Zambia @poverty-action.bsky.social and United Council of Churches Zambia

signal boost!

Thanks to the authors for compiling this information; this view on our science is truly fascinating. 2023: 40% design-based, 40% model-based, 20% other, among quantitative studies aimed at "explanation" which I understand to mean causal inference. Where we will be in 2043?

amazing technical feat and confirmation of a long-standing but tough-to-demonstrate prediction that exposure to online partisan animosity causes decreases in out-party warmth. Haters gonna hate, sure, but more hate makes them hate more!

This paper is great up through table 4 -- very nice RCT evidence that free gym increases exercise and course completion. At table 5, they start controlling for post-treatment variables and drawing unsupported conclusions about mechanisms. Remove to improve!

Here's hoping for dozens and dozens of experimental estimates of the effects of anti-corruption messages on vote choice. We now have enough studies of populist messages for a meta-analysis (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....); maybe soon we'll be able to do the same for anti-corruption?

(prohibition) persuasion in parallel Had fun reconstructing the data from this 90-year old persuasion experiment that shows that "wet" and "dry" college students update their attitudes in the direction of counterattitudinal persuasive information. paper: doi.org/10.1080/0022...

Audit experimenters of Bluesky... did you know there's a creator on TikTok who is calling churches, synagogues, and mosques asking if they have baby formula for her two month old? This is a "one condition" study (no causal inference) but hoo boy the descriptives... www.tiktok.com/@nikalie.mon...

I'm one of those academics who measure message persuasiveness via survey experiment. I think it's absolutely the right method for doing so. I think the response to this good point from @anatosaurus.bsky.social is not to abandon survey exps but instead to measure "getting heard" (attention) also.

lol at the MPSA shade in the last line of the FAQ

Maybe your texts tell you to "BE A VOTER" like mine. It all started because of a PNAS paper that claimed that the noun form it increased voter turnout (relative to the verb form ) by 11 to 14 percentage points. It keeps not replicating, obviously. Most recently doi.org/10.1017/bpp....

Doing meta-reanalysis means my coauthors and I are constantly asking for data. This month we heard back from 21 of 32 author teams on first email, all responses "yes" or "soon." (nice!) Innovation: asking authors to post data publicly rather than privately with us via email (4 did, more will!)

chat's personalized flattery is getting out of hand

rarely have we needed the "suggestive" results from a "factors associated with" design to have the possibility that X affects Y "suggested" to us

encountered this article by David Weimer from 1986 (cited by 7) with three good ideas for improving science that just a few short decades later, we've started to implement. Collective Delusion In The Social Sciences: Publishing Incentives For Empirical Abuse doi.org/10.1111/j.15...

@chloethurston.bsky.social & Mary McGrath (both at @polisciatnu.bsky.social) join the Perspectives on Politics editorial team as Associate Editors in American Politics!

Congrats to @daniel-a-n-goldstein.com and @drewstommes.bsky.social for showing how an information treatment that US wars are fought predominantly by the poor increases preferences for recruiting from the rich. No effect on tax policy tho! here again we see fx on "target attitudes" not "nontarget"

What are you doing Thursday Nov 13? This panel on survey methods for measuring "rare traits" seems v. important especially if we think small numbers of people sometimes have outsize influence on politics. The speakers appear to be Bluesky-less, but I'll tag the moderator @mattgraham.bsky.social!

👀 this new meta-analysis on edutainment by @bardiarahmani.bsky.social, Montano, @dylanwgroves.bsky.social, and Green doi.org/10.1017/bpp.... 377 ests in 77 exps: edutainment moves attitudes, norms, beliefs 📊 Effects persist ⏳ Many reasonable theories about effect heterogeneity are not supported 😇

Currently in FirstView: In “Balancing Precision and Retention in Experimental Design,” @gustavodiaz.org and Erin Rossiter study how experimental design choices can increase precision when estimating treatment effects. Specifically, they examine block-randomized and pre-post designs.

Since it’s the #equinox, time to re-post the best #dataviz I’ve ever done: 365 pictures of the Earth from space, taken at exactly 6:00 a.m. Details on the NASA Earth Observatory: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/52248...

love this #notamap as a way of understanding the scale of land use. we're so used to seeing state borders and we have a rough sense of their relative sizes -- this plot makes great use of that

The great Vincent Arel-Bundock shows how to use marginaleffects post-estimation summaries with DeclareDesign simulations!

Grateful to Matt Baum, Jamie Druckman, @jonmladd.bsky.social @brendannyhan.bsky.social @dannagal.bsky.social for joining the Author Meets Critics session on The American Mirage tomorrow at 12:00. If you spot me at the conference, ask for my favorite book merch: a custom magnetic bottle opener!

I'm once again a session chair for APSA and will be imposing the Nyhan / Samii rules. Encourage your chairs to do the same. I don't see any good arguments for the usual all papers all discussant comments all questions format

whaaaat!? that's so cool! literally just: weird_trick = D * X iv_robust(weird_trick ~ D | Z) to get the mean of X among compliers!

All statistical models are wrong, but some are stupid

Suppose there are only two publication tracks for an experiment: 1) Pre-registered experiment: PAP -> Realization -> Submit -> RR -> Publication 2) Registered report: PAP -> Submit -> RR -> Realization -> RR2 -> Publication when should we want 2 not 1? to protect against "null risk"?

It is *so hard* to fight this kind of asymmetry. Any suggestions or workflows you do to counteract?

Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science is hiring *multiple* senior folks (assoc/full prof) working on democracy broadly (institutions, political behavior, CP, AP). I’m not on the committee (hiding on research leave), but I'm happy to chat / answer questions! 👉 apply.interfolio.com/172986