Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

🎓 This Friday (19.09), we are honored to welcome professor @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social to the #HotPoliticsLab! She will present her work on Facebook user reactions to party campaigning. 📍 Location: Common Room (REC-B9.22) 💻 Or join us online 👉 teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/...

🚨New pre-print🚨 "Do citizens’ views of democracy and its actors vary with how they feel?”, @lilymasonphd.bsky.social and I ask in a new paper. Why would they? While citizens widely endorse democracy in principle, temporary factors often shape their views. Also, work on “irrelevant events" 1/8🧵

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

✨ New Academic Year, New Speaker Series! ✨ We hope you all had a wonderful summer break. We’re thrilled to announce the #HotPoliticsLab Speaker Series lineup for the first semester of the 25/26 academic year. We look forward to welcoming you back for another year of thought-provoking discussions!

1/4 My first dissertation paper is now out with @bnbakker.bsky.social & @gijsschumacher.bsky.social! Do our brains quickly encode partisan bias when simply viewing politicians’ faces? The paper: doi.org/10.1080/1747... Journalistic article by Psypost: www.psypost.org/early-brain-...

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

🚀 gratia 0.11.0 is out! Now has a paper in JOSS — please cite 📄 doi.org/10.21105/jos... Experimental parallel processing ⚡ New assemble() for building plots 🎨 Better support for complex families + new diagnostics 🧪 Lots of bug fixes + polish ✨ 👉 gavinsimpson.github.io/gratia/ #Rstats

NEW - Media Platforming and the Normalisation of Extreme Right Views - cup.org/4mmVIAL "exposure to uncritical interviews increases agreement with extreme statements and perceptions of broader support in the population" - @dianebolet.bsky.social & @florianfoos.bsky.social #OpenAccess

🚨Pre-print alert🚨 Research shows citizens in many Western democracies are increasingly affectively polarized––they feel warm toward their own party but quite cold toward opposing parties. But how does it feel to “feel warmly”? @katharinalawall.bsky.social, @mtsakiris.bsky.social & I asked. 🧵1/8

🚨New paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨 Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? We review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological & structural factors that shape information spread online and offline: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lRke4sIRv...

Conspiracies emerge in the wake of high-profile events, but you can’t debunk them with evidence because little yet exists. Does this mean LLMs can’t debunk conspiracies during ongoing events? No! We show they can in a new working paper. PDF: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨Preprint alert🚨 How does affective polarization change democracy? Lots of pubs study how AP affects trust, democratic norms, inter-partisan attitudes, and participation. We (w/ @polpsychjoe.bsky.social, @lilymasonphd.bsky.social) examine a vital assumption this research seems to rely on: 1/6🧵

Are we good at describing our feelings about politics? In our new preprint @mrooduijn.bsky.social @isabellareb.bsky.social we show this is not the case: osf.io/preprints/os... [1/6]

🚨New paper!🚨 Meta-analysis on 4M p-values across 240k psych articles: How has psychology changed since the replication crisis began? How is replicability linked to citations, impact factor, and university prestige? 🧵 Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Interactive: pbogdan.com/meganal

Don't assume, plot datacolada.org/126

Recent research shows that AI can durably reduce belief in conspiracies. But does this work b/c the AI is good at producing evidence, or b/c ppl really trust AI? In a new working paper, we show that the effect persists even if the person thinks they're talking to a human: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

New preprint with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @randomwalker.bsky.social @orbenamy.bsky.social @lfoswaldo.bsky.social where we argue for a complex-system perspective to understand the causal effects of social media on society and for a triangulation of methods arxiv.org/abs/2505.09254

🚨 “We just need to recognize that we’re all citizens of this country.” –– Politicians + citizens often stress a shared national identity when trying to bridge racial, partisan, or other group divides. @stysyropoulos.bsky.social & I show why such “shared” identities are doomed to fail. 🧵1/9

1/7 First paper of my dissertation now out in EJPR with @bnbakker.bsky.social & @gijsschumacher.bsky.social Can we measure affective polarization in systems with 6, 10, or even more parties without overburdening respondents or compromising validity? We show how. Paper: doi.org/10.1111/1475...

The first preprint from my PhD is out: osf.io/preprints/ps...! 🥳 We explored the temporal dynamics of four careless responding indicators (response time, within-beep standard deviation, an inconsistency index, occasion-person correlation) in ESM data across different samples. Thread below🧵

Does loneliness correlate with support for the populist radical right? In the Netherlands, yes-lonelier individuals were more likely to support the PRR across 15 years of data (2008-2023), with effect sizes comparable to health correlates of loneliness. (1/9) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now published in PNAS! We had a survey in the field at the time of the first assassination attempt on Trump. We found that Rs became significantly less supportive of partisan violence and had increased in-party affect. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Kiezers vinden immigratie ongeveer net zo belangrijk als energiekosten en klimaat. Ze zijn er alleen minder bezorgd over en ervaren immigratie als minder bedreigend dan energiekosten en klimaat. - @bnbakker.bsky.social, @gijsschumacher.bsky.social en ik op Stuk Rood Vlees. shorturl.at/dKRXZ