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Samantha Joel

@datingdecisions.bsky.social

Social psychologist, relationships enthusiast, Associate Prof at Western University 🇨🇦.

306 Posts1987 Follower 909 Folgt

Julia Strand @juliafstrand.bsky.social · 5d ago

My department is hiring 2 (TWO!) Tenure Track faculty in Developmental Psych and Biological Psych, to start Fall 2027. Deadlines 9/1 (Developmental) and 10/1 (Biological). More info here: www.carleton.edu/psychology/i.... Reach out with questions! carleton.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Carlet...

Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology

The Carleton Psychology Department is seeking candidates for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Developmental Psychology (preferably with a focus on social, personality, and/or identity de...

carleton.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Eric Hehman @erichehman.bsky.social · 6d ago

McGill social psych is now officially hiring at the assistant prof level, hooray Happy to chat with anyone about the position mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 3w ago

AI is destroying the sources of knowledge that it's trained on, because real human experts no longer have the incentive to donate their time on platforms like Stack Overflow.

Research shows experts and contributors leaving online communities amidst silent 'knowledge reset'

AI may have killed Stack Overflow while training on the same platform, as it pushed expert contributors away from the platform

techradar.com

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 4w ago

inspired by @russpoldrack.org's AI policy for his lab, last night I drafted up this AI policy and came up with an initial set of use case suggestions for my lab

General principles
Here are a few key principles that govern our use of AI in scientific work.
AI tools are not necessarily useful. Despite what you might have heard in OpenAI's advertising, using AI tools is the wrong choice for many tasks. Alternative and often more old-fashioned tools will do a better job for quite a few specific things (see this instagram feed for a variety of examples); one should never assume that an AI tool is the default "best thing to try". Moreover, because verifying AI results can be time-consuming, there are plenty of cases where you'll spend less time learning how to do X (i.e., by working on it yourself) rather than having Claude do X and then spending weeks to painstakinly confirm that it worked.
AI usage does not absolve you of your responsibility for your own science. We are responsible for the science that we produce, both from an ethical standpoint and a practical one. Any errors in your work are your responsibility, any security risks caused by AI usage (see below) are your responsiblity, and so on. Just as you must debug the outputs of your analysis code, the outputs of any/all AI usage must be carefully verified.
AI usage requires disclosure. The decision to use (or not use) AI tools for any aspect of the scientific process is one that requires discussion with all leaders of a project. This is both for scientific reasons (i.e., we ourselves must know what our project invovles) and practical ones: many scientific societies and jouranls require the disclosure of AI usage.
AI tools may present security risks. Many commercially available AI tools, especially free ones, do not provide substantive protections regarding inputs provided by users. Put another way, you don't know what will happen to the text, data, images, or anything else you show a third-party AI tool. This may present substantial security risks.
AI is not for scientific writing. Papers are the primary end product of our science. Scientific writing distills our thinkin…

How to handle AI usage
Like many things in our lab, it's best to be vocal. You should always feel free to raise the possibility of AI usage on a project. For any potential use case, chat with your labmates, your collaborators, and Sam about it. Discussion with external-to-lab collaborators can be particularly important given the issue of disclosure, mentioned above; you may not be aware of what AI tools collaborators are using, unless you've asked.
You should also be skeptical of the utility of AI for a specific task (not least because of the billions of dollars being thrown at selling AI subscriptions to universities and other institutions). One thing to consider might be whether the use case is something that would actually be useful for you to master yourself. For example, a common web element that turns up in tons of online experiments would probably be worth your figuring out how to code up from scratch, since you'll use it often in online experiments and figuring it out may help you come up with new ideas for how to design a game. In contrast, an esoteric web element that you'll use for one experiment and never again might be a better fit to farm out to Claude.
With the above General Principles in mind, we do not have any blanket policy about where AI should and shouldn't be used in research, with the clear exception of drafting text for manuscripts, grant proposals, posters, reports, or any other text-based scientific product: AI tools should never be used for writing, i.e., no copying and pasting of text directly from an LLM is appropriate, without explicit discussion and agreement prior to generating the text.
Other use cases are worth considering, however, and should be considered freely. Some good and bad examples follow, based on the principles above (we should populate more examples as they come up).

Some potential examples of AI usage
AI as a cheap web developer. If you're coding up a gamified experiment it can be quite difficult to learn a whole bunch of web development from scratch. Claude will be better at this than you, and that's fine: we are not a web development lab, we're a cognitive science one, so it's not essential that you become a super-proficient dev. Vibe-coding web stuff is a pretty decent use case. (But you must very carefully ensure that whatever AI tools code up for you behave exactly as you expect them to, e.g., if you've vibe-coded a specific form of randomized experiment, you'll need to check that the randomization is being carried out appropriately).
AI as a code reviewer. You might try using an AI tool to figure out why your CSS isn't displaying properly or to help debug code in general. (But you must never provide participant data to a third-party LLM, as this would be a data security risk; and you must always double- and triple-check the tool's output, just as you would with a human code reviewer or if you were trying out tips from Stack Exchange).
AI as a search engine. You might try using an AI tool to discover types of models or analysis approaches that you hadn't heard of before, or to turn up obscure research papers. (But you'll need to verify the output carefully with trusted sources, to ensure accuracy; and you should never, ever treat AI-generated search results as an objective and accurate summary, as they are far from unbiased and are often inaccurate, especially when it comes to scientific questions — try asking Gemini whether music makes you smarter).
AI as a sketch pad. You might try using an AI tool to generate ideas for what to put in a scientific figure, or come up with creative different layouts, which you then use as inspiration for figures you create yourself. (But you should not provide data to an LLM and ask for figures to be produced for you, since this often leads to laughably bad outcomes; it also would not be r…

Some bad examples of AI usage
AI as a data analyst. You should not provide a dataset to an AI tool (this is a security risk) and you should not ask an AI tool to write analysis code for you from scratch. Analyses done without statistical understanding are worse than no analyses at all. While it's OK to use an AI tool to help debug your analysis code, your development as a statistical analyst is part of your scientific development, so it's a bad idea to farm this out.
AI as a literature reviewer. You should not use AI to generate reference lists or summarize whole fields of literature for you. AI tools notoriously cite papers that do not exist, and they recapitulate well-known biases in science (e.g., citing more male authors than female ones).
AI as an illustrator. We are fundamentally opposed to the practice of AI models appropriating human artists' work to produce generative imagery and so we do not support its use for scientific work. The reputational risks associated with embarrassing errors in generative imagery are also substantial. We are lucky to have grants available to us that can be used to pay illustrators and graphic designers for work, and we regularly hire folks like this. Talk to Sam if you have a design need on a project that you'd like us to fund; it's a much better call than using AI.

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · last mo.

I need someone to talk me out of rebranding my lab to the Social Assessments and Measures lab

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · last mo.

We should ALL be protesting our premier at his cottage in a kayak. torontolife.com/city/protest...

Protestors paddled to Doug Ford's cottage in kayaks - Toronto Life

The group of OPSEU members made their way to the premier's Muskoka shoreline to demand a retroactive wage increase following the repeal of Bill 124

torontolife.com

Protzko @protzko.bsky.social · last mo.

I feel like "The conclusions of this paper are fully in line with the corresponding author's whole schtick so they really want them to be true" should count as a conflict of interest #phdsky

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · last mo.

The funneling of public funds into for-profit companies has been devastating public infrastructure for decades. Now it's come for the NSF.

Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽@needhibhalla.bsky.social · last mo.

tech capture of the NSF: “it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award.”

Daniel P. Moriarity @dpmoriarity.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨University of Pennsylvania will be re-instating the GRE as a requirement for Psychology PhD admissions for the coming cycle 🚨

Dr. Joscelin Rocha-Hidalgo 🇧🇴🏳️‍🌈@joscelinrocha.com · 2mo ago

Deciding if a color palette is colorblind-friendly is a hard task. The goal of colorblindcheck is to provide tools to decide if the selected color palette is colorblind-friendly. to repo : buff.ly/rQryfEe site: buff.ly/pUMk0Cu

GitHub - Nowosad/colorblindcheck: Tools helping to decide if a color palette is colorblind friendly

Tools helping to decide if a color palette is colorblind friendly - Nowosad/colorblindcheck

buff.ly

John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Apropos of nothing, anyone interested in joining a "software* in social/personality psychology"-themed SPSP submission? *could be R/python packages, dashboards, web-based or mobile apps, etc.,

John Sakaluk@johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Social/Personality Psych people: what are some of your favourite research software products/papers that have come out in the last ~5 years?

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New team science initiative just dropped! manyscale.org We're looking for collaborators to lead repositories of self-report measures in their own psychology subfields.

ManyScale - A Home for Psychological Measures and Constructs

ManyScale will be a network of repositories for self-report measures in psychology.

manyscale.org

Protzko @protzko.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#psych content journals need sections for pure methods papers. Methods papers are put in methods journals read by methods people. But non-methods folk don't read those journals, so they miss the methodological insights/updates. Where are the content journals that eagerly publish methods papers?

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Within the next year, we'll be looking for folks to help expand this website into "ManyScale". We want to help you use this code to make your own repository for your subfield. SelfScale, EmotoScale, PoliticoScale, etc. If that sounds exciting to you, please reach out!

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We made an open repository of close relationships measures. Our goal is to catalogue all of the published self-report measures in relationship science. You can help us expand the database by suggesting measures you tend to use in your research, or by uploading your own measures! relascale.com

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Inspired by this wonderful repository, I've begun the process of making my own repository of published self/other-report measures in aggression science. It's incomplete but I hope it's a start to something useful to those who study human harm-doing. davidchester.weebly.com/aggression-s...

Aggression Scales

List of Aggression Questionnaires This list focuses on self-report and other-report questionnaires and does not include behavioral tasks that quantify aggression (e.g., the Taylor Aggression...

davidchester.weebly.com

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Social/Personality Psych people: what are some of your favourite research software products/papers that have come out in the last ~5 years?

Melanie Fischer @melaniefischer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Looks like this will be a super valuable resource for folks interested in relationship science across different disciplines. Very cool!

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Every scholarly area needs a measure repository like this.

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

RelaScale - Psychological Measures and Constructs

RelaScale is a searchable database of psychological measures and constructs for relationship researchers.

relascale.com

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm working on a review of close relationships measures. Going back and reading the original papers in which our classic scales were validated has been an eye-opening experience. E.g., Spanier's (1976) dyadic adjustment paper opens by arguing that we shouldn't use marital adjustment as a construct.

John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Will have more to say about the dySEM paper (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social )/JOSS another time, but for, now, just struck--similar to doing my first Registered Report--in terms of how much I feel like this approach (not without tradeoffs) is a big improvement in terms of scientific value-allignment

Journal of Open Source Software@joss-openjournals.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Just published in JOSS: 'dySEM: An <em>R</em> Package for Dyadic Structural Equation Modeling with Latent Variables' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.10115

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It’s amazing how many topics and research areas largely just boil down to attitude valence.

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Linda Skitka @lindaskitka.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Kind of a wild finding, that in hindsight nonetheless makes sense. How many other “multidimensional” constructs boil done to a positive versus a negative evaluation?

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Paul Eastwick @pauleastwick.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I was STUNNED that this model ended up being the winner. No Big 5, or Big 3, or Big Anything. Relationships measures capture positivity, layered on top of item-specific content. That's it. It feels like we need to start developing new measures from square one.

Samantha Joel@datingdecisions.bsky.social · 4mo ago

And then finally, it was possible we would find that all of the different relationship measures primarily tap into a single, global construct, with no distinct, substantive factors remaining. (6/12)

A structural equation model in which many different measures load onto a single, general factor

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures

In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...

journals.plos.org

Kimberly Quinn 🇨🇦@kimberlyquinn.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Exciting! #cdnpoli

And the winner is… - Avi Lewis wins NDP leadership race in decisive first-ballot victory

Avi Lewis has won the leadership of the federal NDP. The crowd broke out into a raucous cheer when his vote total was announced. He won with more than 39,000 votes.

cbc.ca

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Given how machine learning practices have evolved in the last decade, I was very curious if these findings would hold up. Many thanks to Florian for his nuanced and thorough review. Romantic desire: not predictable in 2017, not predictable in 2026.

ERROR@error.reviews · 5mo ago

New report: Joel, Eastwick, & Finkel (2017) “Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction”. Based on the review by @florianpargent.bsky.social, we find Minor Errors that do not affect the core conclusions of the manuscript. osf.io/hxnum

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Study promotion for a great PhD student! If you and/or your romantic partner are experiencing depressive symptoms, consider participating in this online study. Your participation can help researchers better understand romantic partner support. Open to couples of any gender or sexual orientation 🌈

Justin Chandler @justinchandler.work · 5mo ago

"Students across the province are protesting recent changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) — the post-secondary financial aid system will go from a majority grant structure to a majority loan structure in the new school year." www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #OnPoli

'No cuts, no fees, no corporate universities': Students stage mass protest over Ford government’s OSAP cuts | CBC News

Students across the province are protesting recent changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) — the post-secondary financial aid system will go from a majority grant structure to a major...

cbc.ca

Malte Elson @malte.the100.ci · 5mo ago

Our institute is hiring 1. an assistant professor (with TT) for Social Psychology (focus: environmental psychology) ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo... 2. an assistant lecturer (with TT) for Experimental Personality Psychology ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo...

Assistant Professor Tenure Track for Social Psychology with a Focus on Environmental Psychology - Universität Bern

Universität Bern is looking for Assistant Professor Tenure Track for Social Psychology with a Focus on Environmental Psychology

ohws.prospective.ch