Alon Zivony
@alonzivony.bsky.social
Lecturer of Psychology, studying visual attention (with EEG) and prejudice against LGBTQ+ @ University of Sheffield (he/him) Visit the Sheffield PandA Lab: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/panda-lab/home
If the British media wasn't full of cowards and transphobes, stories like this would be front page news
Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 3d agoA trans man in the UK has been banned in the workplace restrooms after he was forced to use the women's restrooms to comply with the new EHRC guidance. The women complained because he is visibly male and so they told him he can't use any bathroom.
![A screenshot of a Reddit post from the r/LegalAdviceUK subreddit by user Dijstraanon, titled "FtM transgender facing two different issues at work? England."
The post text reads:
"Brother in law is trans FtM and presents fully as a man. He's now facing an impossible situation at work with his employer telling him that due to recent legislation he must use the toilet of his birth gender. BUT several female colleagues have raised a grievance about him using their gendered toilet.
His employer has told him that he cannot use the toilet while he is at work until they sort it out and cannot give him a timeframe to do so. They do [cut off] have disabled separate toilets.
In the mean time one of his female colleagues has accused him of sexual harassment because he was used their gendered toilet. His menstrual cycle meant he needed to use the toilet.
He's been with the employer for just over 5 years but only in this location for 18 months. The location is mainly male with just a handful of females, and his workshop only has male toilets.
I do not know how to support him and as he's not in a union there is no one to turn too right now."
The post has an orange "Comments Moderated" tag, 169 upvotes, and 134 comments.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/bafkreigy6jrfjxyegrf7h4wzz3yptwmzobhjrd3k5zjoxwd75r6ulxzsyq)
Very excited to share my first first-author paper! Big thank you to my co-authors @cvonbastian.bsky.social and @alonzivony.bsky.social 😊 If you are interested in familiarity, attention and memory research, you can read our paper using the link below! 😄 link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Is your lab doing research in developmental cognitive psychology? Are you looking for (online) speakers for your lab meetings? Then perhaps reach out to Jenny.
Jenny Wang 👶 🧮@jinjingjenny1.bsky.social · 4d agoThank you for the tip! Online talk is a great idea!! (and I'd be happy to give an online talk in (the generic) your department/lab! if my research is relevant, of course!)
Abi now has bsky because her millennial supervisor told her that social media can be beneficial for academic networking. If you want you can prove me right by following her new account her @awyllie.bsky.social
Alon Zivony@alonzivony.bsky.social · 5d agoSharing a big first: the first 1st-author paper from my first PhD student, Abi Wyllie. Definitely a first worth celebrating. So here's a summary, if you're interested in familiarity, memory, and attention. rdcu.be/2uSWUCg3PBia
Sharing a big first: the first 1st-author paper from my first PhD student, Abi Wyllie. Definitely a first worth celebrating. So here's a summary, if you're interested in familiarity, memory, and attention. rdcu.be/2uSWUCg3PBia
Do I know any expectation researchers here on bsky? I have a question: what happens to our expectations when we see something surprising? Do we just let go of all expectations? Are we less likely to be surprised again? (by something different)
Marking resit assignments for my Year2 statistics module & the whiff of LLM use is overwhelming: BSc students who failed the module are producing perfectly-written high-level academic text that you might find in papers by Lakens or other highly-qualified stats writers the future is exams & vivas 😢
Does being a progressive man come at a social cost? Not at all; it pays off. Across 4 prereg. experiments, progressive men were perceived more positively than traditionally masculine men. Ayca’s second PhD paper already published nearing the submission of her PhD! Very proud! doi.org/10.1002/casp...
So what did we learn? Don't fabricate your data. Or, if you do, don't be so bad at it. Or, if you are, don't become so famous that people will actually be interested in double checking.
Data Colada@datacolada.bsky.social · 2w agoAn influential paper by Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) reported two studies with tampered data. Post 1 of 2. datacolada.org/138
I made a mistake. And because of that mistake, I no longer have confidence that results that I reported in several research papers are an accurate reflection of replication rates. 1/
Is it interesting whether prejudice results in an attention bias? It's been reported in social cognition research, but I suspect it's actually wrong. I've been trying for several years now to find a paradigm that produces replicable effects and failed. Would a registered report be worth the effort?
Trans human rights should not be dependent in any way on biology At the same time, the science is pretty clear that transgender modality is a natural phenomenon
Catherine Cowie 🏳️⚧️@64ordle.au · 2w agoMonozygotic (MZ) or identical twins are significantly more likely to both be trans (21.2%, 47/222) than the case of dizygotic (DZ) of non-identical twins (8.7%, 21/241), out of 463 twin pairs, suggesting genetics *does* play some part contributing to gender identity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Every reviewer wants a shorter paper, containing three additional papers
I don’t know how to explain to you that flat earthers being underrepresented in NASA is not actually oppression
Jason Lee Byas@jasonleebyas.bsky.social · 3w agoYes, I support academic freedom for racism, eugenics, Maoism, a belief in violence for its own sake, Murder Jason Lee Byas Thought, support for ISIS, support for total human extinction, and whatever else you have in mind. "Academic freedom but just for good people" is not a practicable principle.
Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Excel: It’s January 2
Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · 3w agoOptimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Historian: The cup can teach you a lot of things that you do not want to know
Biological sex doesn’t divide neatly into two categories, or even along one spectrum. Our bodies are "mosaics" of traits. A biologist explains more: theconversation.com/biological-s...
Our study of autism community perspectives about Open Data has now been published at @collabrapsychology.bsky.social (🔓) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... Participants were generally optimistic about open data to advance autism research and reduced participant burden. But,
Open Data in Autism Research: The Views of Autistic People and Parents of Autistic Children
Open data has been promoted as a tool to improve the transparency, robustness, and efficiency of scientific research. However, the perspectives of participant communities, particularly those who are m...
online.ucpress.edu
As much as i hate 'AI' (LLMs), i also (love)hate #RegressionToTheMean (RtM) There's an LLM-critical thread of papers & comments finding RtM when comparing human & machine grading of essays Stories of 'compression' & 'homogenisation' abound... But it's *expected*! www.linkedin.com/posts/samill...
#assessmentinhe #highereducation #genai #aiineducation #criticalailiteracy | Sam Illingworth | 35 comments
New research has shown how marking with AI regresses towards the mean. Researchers at Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd, Sheffield Hallam University, & University of Melbourne set out to test ...
linkedin.com
I'm planning on having students do more in-class writing in both my freshman and upper-level classes. If you are too, let's share prompts? Here are some of mine that I'm tinkering with:
#AcademicSky Wow. It always amazing me how much car crashes increase around relatively minor things (including time changes). Goes to show you how much we need our attention to drive, even if it feels automatic and "easy".
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 4w agoTop album releases linked to rise in fatal crashes as ‘distracted’ drivers access music
Sometime soon the crisis in UK universities will flare up in a way that the UK government won't be able to ignore anymore. And we will all feel like a bunch of Cassandras, hoarse from shouting about what was obviously coming, but never being listened to. www.theguardian.com/education/20...
UK universities face ‘financial crisis’ amid collapse in international students
Higher education figures call on Labour to reverse tax on fees and warn institutions at risk of ‘going under’
theguardian.com
A question to the experimental psychologists out there: Is there a standardised way to measure effort spent on an experiment? As in, asking something like "how effortful was this task?" I'm sure there are a million problems with just asking that I'm not thinking about
Out of this whole vast universe, you and I and everyone we know live at a time and place where this utter magic is happening.
Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli@banditelli.org · last mo.Sometimes I see something in nature and then spend the next several years waiting for the shot. Sometimes I never get it. Sometimes you see it and a week later you land it: I give you tonight's murder of crows in front of the sunset. 🪶
One weird thing revealed by the Arday discourse is that academia is held to a much higher standard than any other institution. We prosecute thousands of people who lie, cheat and steal in the business world every year. But this is not taken as evidence of a fundamental problem with "business." 1/4
The EHRC guidance does not apply to workplaces, and trans people are not criminalised for using any toilet in the UK. But the whole point of this - as with Section 28 back in the 1980s - is to intimidate people. Don't give into that fear.
REMEMBER The guidance coming into effect today doesn't dictate what you're allowed to do as an individual. It for service providers and business owners. Do not cower in fear, do not reduce yourself, do not isolate, that is one of the intended effects.
Tomorrow the UK's new code of practice regarding single-sex spaces will come into effect. It allows for the exclusion of trans people from all single-sex spaces, an obviously exclusionary and dangerous policy. If you are in the education space, talk to your trans* students. They need allies.
Here is my article, which caused Jesse Singal to have wild hallucinations about what happens in neurology clinics.
The Anti-Trans Obsessions of “Skeptic” Michael Shermer: Hallucinating Imaginary Demons to Empower Actual Villains, Once Again.
I want to demonstrate to Michael Shermer that it’s possible for men like us to not talk about trans people constantly. If I can do it, so can he.
sciencebasedmedicine.org
abolish silicon valley@teefofgod.bsky.social · last mo.i got like, three paragraphs into this article to find the link and. my god he's such a fucking moron. mediocre white guys can build entire careers on obsessing over kids' genders and genitals, and then use their upset at being correctly identified as odious little freaks as fodder for said career.
This graph took me 3 years to make. It's perhaps the largest-ever #metaanalysis of #TMS #BrainStim data. It includes my first real scientific discovery 🧵: When you stimulate the hand with a brief electric pulse, your brain and spinal cord are momentarily less excitable: muscle output decreases 1/n
