Dani Cosme

@dcosme.bsky.social

Social affective neuroscientist at Penn studying motivation, resilience, individual & collective behavior change. Interests: climate, civic engagement, autonomy, solidarity, self & social development, youth participatory action research dcosme.github.io

🚨 New preprint out! 🚨 We’ve spent years assuming liberals and conservatives prioritize fundamentally different moral values—and designing persuasive messages based on that assumption. Our data suggest there's more to the story, and that making that assumption can backfire.

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For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

Elon Musk's $1.32 Trillion, to Scale

The first trillionaire's fortune, one pixel per $1,000 — scroll past every dollar, and see what a fraction of it could do instead.

stanford.edu

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Dan Vergano@danvergano.bsky.social · 2mo ago

White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval of research grants These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Where did this year's #psychjobs market end up? Thanks to an unusually high number late postings, not as bad as it was looking earlier in the year. Still, this is the smallest number of jobs posted since 2012, representing a 26% decline from last year (~2/3rds the size of the covid drop in 2020).

Bar graph showing tenure track psychology jobs posted each year since 2010 broken up by area.
Mark Thornton@markthornton.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Another ~monthly update on the state of the #psychjobs market: more jobs continue to trickle in, though at a decreasing pace. We've nearly hit parity with covid in absolute terms, although the prior year baseline was higher this year than that, so we still see a slightly larger relative decrease.

Check out the latest climate communication research at Penn during our event next week!

Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media@penncssm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Join us on 4/21 with @falklab.bsky.social for "Annenberg Climate Communication Flash Talks" from 230-4pm. Hear from researchers across PCSSM, @asc.upenn.edu, & @appc.upenn.edu who focus on climate change or w/ implications for our climate future. Register here: web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm/calend...

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Climate Change & Mental Health 📅 Submission deadline: 3 August 2026 👉 Learn more and submit your manuscript here: lnkd.in/eeXmuCF7 Please share with colleagues and networks working at the intersection of climate science, psychology, and public health.

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SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

SCORE | Center for Open Science

SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

cos.io

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

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Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats

Job Opening: Data Scientist – Grant Witness

Grant Witness seeks a data scientist for a full-time position on our team tracking changes to U.S. federal grantmaking. We are also hiring for part-time/contract positions. Join us!

grant-witness.us

📢 New preprint from the lab🧠 ▶️doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.12.710517 What does fMRI connectivity actually reflect at the neural level? The natural intuition is: more neural activity = more connectivity! Using cortical perturbations we show this is not necessarily the case: sometimes less is more! 👇🧵

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Hey y'all! Very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting Communication Science Futures again in East Lansing later this year. The conference in 2024 was a blast, and we're looking forward to running it back! Keynote speaker: James Pennebaker Submission deadline: June 5th. → commscifutures.com

Home | Communication Science Futures

Communication Science Futures is a conference aimed at addressing pressing issues and opportunities in the interdisciplinary, social...

commscifutures.com

‼️ We are on track for a staggering 98% reduction in posted NIH funding opportunities this year relative to historical norms. Political review and red tape are blocking approval of funding announcements across the board. See Elizabeth Ginexi’s analysis: elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/i-wrote-re...

I Wrote Research Funding Announcements for NIH for 22 Years. This Year They’ve Published 14

How NIH went from 756 funding announcements to 14 in two years — and what it means for every disease that depends on federal research

elizabethginexi.substack.com

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success.

Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

X2Y@x2y.tech · 6mo ago

SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹) RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

As I say here, there is no scientific justification to revoke the engagement finding. In fact, over the last 15+ yrs, the evidence of how climate change affects our health has only grown. Higher risk of allergies, dementia, fertility, heart disease, and death: that’s what’s on the line. @nature.org

There is No Scientific Justification to Revoke the Endangerment Finding

The U.S. EPA's decision to repeal the Endangerment Finding will limit the government's ability to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

nature.org

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below