This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

In my paper Sample Size Justification I discuss 6 approaches to justifying sample sizes. The focus of the paper is to teach people the tools they need to be honest when they explain where their sample size comes from. I know, so radical ;) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix. I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

Is Santa Real? Many users feel they're getting presents from him. Scientists say it's time to consider whether they're onto something.

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

I'm looking for EMA software that can do relative scheduling: participants report a time in their first daily questionnaire (e.g. "woke up at 7am"), then follow-ups trigger x hours after that reported time. I would greatly appreciate any recommendations!

It’s astonishing how many researchers seem to believe that a cluster analysis is such a sensible analysis that it needn’t even be justified through a coherent research question. Just cluster analysis go brrrrr

Exciting PhD opportunity with @matti.vuorre.com! ⬇️

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Some people are at greater risk of experiencing negative mental health outcomes of social media use than others, but why? 🧵 We examined whether individual differences in cognitive processes shape risk and resilience to mental health effects on social media: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint: What does the research landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning look like 🌍? We developed an LLM-powered bibliometric analysis to characterize article clusters, investigate their connections, and examine the distribution of topics across the landscape. osf.io/6c2va_v1

The framing around 'stricter age restrictions' feels disproportionate considering the magnitude of the effects. I ran some rough calculations: Cohen's d ≈ 0.059 and 0.114 for the group comparisons on the cognitive composite measure.

Betteridge’s law of headlines is strong with this one. arxiv.org/abs/2510.02408

Everyone knows that temporal contiguity is important for associative learning. As the interval between a cue (e.g., a light) and an outcome (e.g., shock) gets longer, the conditioned response (e.g., freezing to the tone) is acquired less quickly.

they just slapped a surgeons general warning on RFK like he’s a pack of cigarettes

psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge

i looked at the methodology for this and it is a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and b. p-hacked

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸 How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data. www.science.org/content/arti...

😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice doi.org/10.1038/s442...

on.ft.com/46EDjIX Europe’s bill for extreme weather damage more than doubles this decade (2020-23 costs already more than double previous 10 years - good thing financial markets are so forward-looking. Oh)

Grateful to @rcpsych.bsky.social for the opportunity to present my research on “Rethinking social media addiction” and participate in the panel discussion. Looking forward to translating the insights into the clinical-focused work in the pipeline.

Reposting twice because it's such a great read!

What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health? Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social

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 🧵

Excited to see this brilliant work from @bcdavidson.bsky.social preprinted! Check it out at osf.io/preprints/ps...

If true, this update is astonishing. The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump. This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

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...

If you are preparing your bachelor statistics course and would like to add optional material for students to better understand statistics on a conceptual level (see topics in the screenshot) my free textbook provides a state of the art overview. lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Do researchers’ financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials of internet-based interventions for depression affect the outcomes? This meta-analysis suggests that COIs may lead to inflated effect-size estimates. 🩺 #neuroskyence www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

#CPConf2025 is a wrap - thanks to everyone who made this event so special! @unituebingen.bsky.social @tueneurocampus.bsky.social

I'm hiring 2+ 2.5-year postdocs over the next few months. Job 1: looking for someone with deep expertise in computational modelling (reinforcement learning, agent based modelling) on real-world/complex data (closing: 18 August, starting: October-December), www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52059/

Brilliant work by @saramehrhof.bsky.social on shared neurocognitive signatures of psychiatric and metabolic disorder at #cpconf2025

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

We have a ✨NEW PREPRINT✨! Using data from the @clscohorts.bsky.social Millennium Cohort Study and linked healthcare records, we tested the association between social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in secondary care in young people in England. This is still a work in progress - feedback welcome!

Excellent thread on dopamine culture. We have some work in the pipleline that is highly relevant to this!

Finally, the amazing Professor Camilla Nord presents on interoception - including some cool lived experience work on body sensations, and work on disgust and gastric rhythms, alongside work on energy conservation. #BAP2025

Here’s a screenshot of the “addictive use” trajectories from the JAMA paper cited below. My educated guess from the details of the measure is that none of these lines comes close to bona fide “addictive” use 🧵

America is one of those countries where if you host a global sporting event, inclusive messages have to be censored to so as not to anger the central government. In this case the message is “racism is bad” www.nytimes.com/athletic/643...

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising). We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors! www.nature.com/articles/s41... nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

If you want to intervene to improve people's health, more often than not, you are (or should be) asking a causal question - 'what happens to Y when we change X?' Prediction methods are not suited to answering that kind of question.

Harvard university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School www.wgbh.org/news/educati...

Learned something new today: Zotero has a feature where it informs you if an article in your reference library has been retracted. Very cool!

Not sure where to start with this one. Internet gaming addiction… is a risk factor for internet gaming disorder

New post: I was curious about the consensus statement on social media effect and wondered how the sausage gets made. rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2025-0...

Highly important and timely article about mental health lessons in schools. Sometimes action without evidence is worse than inaction.