The adults have left the building and the outcome is chaos and pain....

R continues to be the most insane programming language ever. Suppose you want to exclude by Age, say 18 year olds. data = filter(data, !(Age == 18)) seems intuitive. Yet, if there are any NAs (missing data for Age) those cases are excluded too. How does that logic make any sense??? Crazy stuff...

“Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him… Don’t believe him.” —Ezra Klein www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/o...

Opinion | Don’t Believe Him

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

nytimes.com

🚨 Misinformation isn’t just noise—it shapes history, fuels division, and even costs lives. 🚨 How do political falsehoods spread—and what actually works to stop them? 🔎📊🧪 Read more: www.bi.edu/research/bus... #Science #Politics #Misinformation #MediaLiteracy

What can we do about misinformation?

Misinformation is here to stay (for now). That does not mean there is nothing to do about it.

bi.edu

Polarization has become a serious threat to shared reality, democracy, and even health "Thousands of people were dying needlessly because they didn’t trust medical advice, or their government, or mainstream media” Reducing partisan animosity is doable, but tricky: www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

My team's recent research: at work, women speak up less than men only when groups are uncivil. Maybe it's not a lack of confidence or leaning in that silences women, but actual cues in the environment. Focus on fixing the incivility, not the women! hbr.org/2025/01/rese...

Research: Incivility at Work Silences Everyone, But Especially Women

Incivility at work isn’t good for anyone. But while both men and women are less likely to speak up in uncivil environments, women are more likely to withhold their ideas due to concerns about gender b...

hbr.org

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

Don't give up - do something. A great list for civic minded Americans, from @protectdemocracy.org open.substack.com/pub/protectd...

How *you* can protect democracy

29 concrete actions you can take right now to protect our system of government

open.substack.com

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

It’s lonely on the Right Loneliness is associated with support for the 🇳🇱 populist radical right. “Loneliness due to its physiologically dysregulating impact on the nervous system, facilitates greater susceptibility towards populist radical right parties” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Loneliness is positively associated with populist radical right support

The mental and physical health consequences of loneliness are well documented. However, loneliness's socio-political ramifications have been largely u…

sciencedirect.com

Skewed polls like this artificially and harmfully increase distrust in government and public institutions by using 2 to 1 weights: "it has been broken". This type of manipulation, often done to create click-bait headlines, has become strikingly common at NYTimes #keepmoneyoutofnews #nytimes #polling

one thing i’m stuck on is this idea that “masculine” energy means license to act like a chud in public, as opposed to more traditional notions of public masculinity, such as those that put a premium on the performance of integrity, honesty, honor and generosity.

🎯🎯

THE AGE OF LIES: Social media (Meta, X, IG, et.) has ended all pretense of relaying facts to the public, the public news media (print, PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc) must call out "Leadership Lies" every day on their reports. Trump's "news conference" yesterday was laced with lies. tinyurl.com/bdh5uvev

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta say good riddance to fact-checking

Social media firms never wanted to be in the content moderation business — now they're starting to leave it behind.

tinyurl.com

One authoritarian scholar notes that there is a difference between a traditional liar and an autocratic liar. The traditional liar lies to conceal, and therefore implicitly respects the power of the listener. The autocrat lies for dominance. The lies are outrageous, but does one dare challenge them?

🧪 Misinformation kills. It fuels political violence, destabilizes societies, and hides behind claims of "free speech." This talk explores: ⚠️ The real harms of falsehoods 🛡️ How we can combat their spread 📜 Why social media regulation is critical 🎥 Watch now: youtu.be/sGPPFKlOIM8 #Misinformation

Partisanship, Misinformation, and the Future of Democracy

YouTube video by Anton Gollwitzer

youtu.be

Why Do We Share False News? Sharing false news isn’t just impulsive; it’s shaped by our biases and habits. Our new framework, the Dynamic Semi-Integrative Approach (DSIA), tested interventions to tackle this problem—and the results are eye-opening #AcademicSky #socialpsyc #polisky #cogsci 🧪

This seems rather good: AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... There's a lot of crappy ideas out there about how to use AI; this seems very much to be a positive application

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Finding agreement through a free exchange of views is often difficult. Collective deliberation can be slow, difficult to scale, and unequally attentive to different voices. In this study, we trained a...

science.org

Inflation is really getting out of control... www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/a...

Who’s Laughing Now? Banana-as-Art Sells for $6.2 Million at Sotheby’s

A conceptual artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, “Comedian,” is just a fruit-stand banana taped on the wall. But 7 bidders were biting. It went to a crypto entrepreneur.

nytimes.com

Having left Twitter/X back when Elon took over, I'm ecstatic to again have a place to check out other researcher's amazing work and share updates from my research lab!! Thanks so much! #bluesky 🧪 #socialpsychology

We used NLP to uncover a troubling trend: when political leaders confidently spread falsehoods, it’s not just noise—it directly predicts an uptick in political violence. Our data foreshadow Trump's second term resulting in a sharp rise in violence 🧪 #psychology #socialpsyc osf.io/preprints/ps...