Markus Appel
@markusappel.bsky.social
Psychology of Communication, Media Psychology, Professor at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Father and former table tennis player.
I like how this set photo from Halloween (1978) makes it look like a breezy summer comedy where a group of friends fall in and out of love while working at the local resort for rich tourists.
4 postdoc openings at the University of Milan with @brunoarpino.bsky.social on aging, digital technologies, and social relationships. Open to PhD holders in sociology, demography, pol sci among others. sites.google.com/site/brunoar...
We have a job opening (Assistant or Associate Prof) in Psychology at Cornell! Focus is on relationship science, broadly defined Deadline is soon: Nov 1st Please pass along to possible applicants! psychology.cornell.edu/open-positio...
Open Positions
Open Positions
psychology.cornell.edu
New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854
Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Fantastic PostDoc job (100%, 4 years) in a cool project at @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social in Berlin funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de with brilliant colleagues @dscheykopp.bsky.social @thothiel.bsky.social @freiheitsrechte.org @wirsindderosten.bsky.social www.weizenbaum-institut.de/news/detail/...
Wissenschaftliche Projektleitung / Postdoctoral Re-searcher (m/w/d) zu Polarisierung auf digitalen Platt-formen
weizenbaum-institut.de
📢 We're hiring! We're looking for new colleagues and have several open positions, ranging from Research Assistant to Research Scientist. If you're passionate about cutting-edge research and want to contribute to innovative projects, explore our current openings:🔗 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/career
COS is announcing important changes to the Open Science Framework (OSF). OSF Projects—used for project collaboration, file mgmt, & storage—is being phased out as an active workspace over the next 6 months. This change does not affect persistence & accessibility of existing public projects. (🧵1/2)
Do you think about doing a PhD? Are you interested in understanding how individuals use digital technologies to cope with the prospect of their own mortality? Then let’s get morbid together. www.mcm.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/06...
mcm.uni-wuerzburg.de
1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.
The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...
pnas.org
Die Forschungsministerin freut sich auf Insta darüber, dass jetzt "Porträts" von Frauen der Geschichte in ihrem Haus hängen. Nur: Die sind mit KI erstellt. Und schleifen die Gesichter der Frauen gemäß moderner westlicher Schönheitsideale glatt. Was für ein irres Projekt Z.B.
New in HCR: @markusappel.bsky.social et al. (2025) show that congeniality bias persisted regardless of fiction vs. non-fiction labeling, emerging for positive portrayals but not for negative ones, with non-fiction slightly preferred overall. Read the full article: doi.org/10.1093/hcr/...
Can fictional stories beat the congeniality bias? Selective exposure to fiction and non-fiction
Abstract. People prefer attitude-consistent information over attitude-inconsistent information (congeniality bias). Connecting theory on the processing of
doi.org
The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!
The latest freedom-loving impulse from the people who cry about "censorship" when Europeans oppose AI-generated child pornography:
Trump warns Netflix of ‘consequences’ unless it pulls top Democrat from board
US president calls for removal of Susan Rice as streaming platform pursues takeover of Warner Bros Discovery
theguardian.com
Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, photographed by David Parks for Life magazine in 1956.
New article in Nature describes a field experiment on X which shows that assigning users to an algorithmic feed pushes conservative content and demotes mainstream news. Sounds obvious but important in light of prior claims algorithms don't cause attitudinal changes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Difficult to see this as anything but an execution by a death squad in broad daylight. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...
Live: Man shot by federal agent in south Minneapolis this morning, witnesses say
A video appears to shows federal agents wrestling a man to the ground then shooting him.
startribune.com
I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
Part 1: How do LLMs work?
YouTube video by Andrew Perfors
youtube.com
Professor @orbenamy.bsky.social from @mrccbu.bsky.social will co-lead the world’s first major trial to test whether reducing social media use can improve teen mental health. Find out more about the IRL Trial: https://bit.ly/4a2FZmB #socialmedia #research
Thousands of UK schoolchildren to take part in major study of social media use and teen mental health
A trial that will put a daily limit on the social media use of thousands of Bradford teenagers is set to begin this year. It will be the largest study yet to investigate whether use of these online pl...
bit.ly
Great thread. Definitely worth reading!
Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 10mo agoA new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration. doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵 Thread—>
Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Using quantitative brain imaging, the authors show opposite fMRI BOLD signal to metabolic activity due to variable oxygen extraction across the human cortex. This questions the canonical interpretatio...
nature.com
"The global wealth gap has become so staggering, and its impact on economies and democratic institutions so corrosive, that policymakers should treat it as an emergency."
Richest 0.001% Now Own Three Times More Wealth Than Poorest Half of Humanity Combined | Common Dreams
A landmark report on global inequality shows that the chasm between the richest slice of humanity and everyone else continued to expand this year
commondreams.org