New essay! Everyone agrees scientists can’t be objective. Activist-scientists say honesty means leaning in: declare your biases and argue them out like a courtroom. But courtrooms need a defense to show up and a neutral referee. Social psych has neither. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

What happens to human psychological wellness when we turn to machines for comfort & love? Join us at The Human Variable: Psychology for the AI Age, hosted by @minzlicht.bsky.social & @anatperry.bsky.social & featuring @davidchalmers.bsky.social. 📅 Oct. 28 | 9 AM – 5 PM ET 📍 Toronto 🔗 uoft.me/cHF

The Human Variable: Psychology for the AI Age — Schwartz Reisman Institute

This one-day conference bringing together researchers from psychology, philosophy, and computer science to ask what the human mind can tell us about AI—and what AI can tell us about the human mind. Pa...

uoft.me

My paper with @chrisoveis.bsky.social, Emily Zohar, and @minzlicht.bsky.social about regulating empathy on social media is now out in SM+S doi.org/10.1177/2056.... We show that training individuals to 'share not compare' for + emotions and 'care not share' for - emotions improves their well-being.

Wise Empathy Improves Well-Being on Instagram - Gregory John Depow, Christopher Oveis, Emily Zohar, Michael Inzlicht, 2026

Two-thirds of the global population spends significant time browsing social media, making it critical to understand how to improve online experiences to support...

doi.org

I'm so excited for this meeting @anatperry.bsky.social I put together for the @torontosri.bsky.social at the end of next month. We're having a panel on AI companions, AI morality, and even a talk on AI and death. And the entire day is capped off by a talk by David Chalmbers. Check it out!

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society@torontosri.bsky.social · 3w ago

What happens to human psychological wellness when we turn to machines for comfort & love? Join us at The Human Variable: Psychology for the AI Age, hosted by @minzlicht.bsky.social & @anatperry.bsky.social & featuring @davidchalmers.bsky.social. 📅 Oct. 28 | 9 AM – 5 PM ET 📍 Toronto 🔗 uoft.me/cHF

I've argued about AI companions with a friend for two years. Neither of us has budged. So I fed an AI everything we'd said and had it write the fight as a dialogue, both sides. Then I edited it, heavily. He's usually right. This time I'll only say he's not wrong. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

An Argument With a Friend Who Doesn't Exist

I have been arguing about AI companions with a friend for two years and neither of us has convinced the other.

open.substack.com

Excited to be giving an invited talk at @torontosri.bsky.social for "The Human Variable: Psychology for the AI Age." This event co-organized by my collaborators @minzlicht.bsky.social @anatperry.bsky.social exemplifies the interdisciplinary spirit of AI empathy research @psuliberalarts.bsky.social

The Human Variable: Psychology for the AI Age — Schwartz Reisman Institute

This one-day conference bringing together researchers from psychology, philosophy, and computer science to ask what the human mind can tell us about AI—and what AI can tell us about the human mind. Pa...

srinstitute.utoronto.ca

📢 Save the date! The Society for the Science of Motivation (SSM) is excited to host the Motivation Science Preconference at the 2027 meeting for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology! 🗓️ Tuesday, February 9th, 8:30am–4:30pm (Eastern) 📍 Virtual

Open science raised the bar. DEI pushed activism toward the center. Both say they're correcting bias. They collide more often that we admit. Ben Lovett traces where the two movements work colide in a guest essay on my Substack. Worth your time! open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Open Science Met Social Justice. They Don't Get Along.

A guest post by Ben Lovett

open.substack.com

📢 Save the date! The Society for the Science of Motivation is excited to announce our first-ever Motivated Cognition satellite meeting at Psychonomics 2026 in San Diego! 🗓️ Thursday, November 19th, 11am–5pm 📍 Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina 🔗 More info: ssmmotivatedcognition.my.canva.site

New episode of @fourbeerspod.bsky.social We had @andymasley.bsky.social on to the show to discuss AI and the environment. We got into data centers, effective altruism and TESCREAL, and whether you should trust a researcher based on who funds them. This was a real fun one! www.fourbeers.com/133

What's the Environmental Cost of AI? (with Andy Masley)

Andy Masley joins Yoel and Mickey to talk about a claim that's made him (in)famous: using AI chatbots doesn't meaningfully affect your carbon footprint or water usage. We ask Andy what data centers ac...

fourbeers.com

New Substack post! Another guest post from my brilliant PhD student Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello on the moralization of AI. Moralizing AI could be a reasonable position, she argues, but is it? Depends on what we know about AI and about how moralization works. She also calls my opinions dumb. Ouch!

Some Things Are Not Negotiable. Is AI One of Them?

Here is another guest post by my PhD student, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello.

open.substack.com

Thank you, Mickey, for this courageous and insightful essay.

Michael Inzlicht@minzlicht.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I p-hacked my early work on prejudice. It never felt like cheating. I now wonder if that's because I believed the cause was good. New essay on why scholar-activism is a dangerous turn for social psychology. If justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

I p-hacked my early work on prejudice. It never felt like cheating. I now wonder if that's because I believed the cause was good. New essay on why scholar-activism is a dangerous turn for social psychology. If justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

My P-Hacking Felt Like Truth

I became a social psychologist because I wanted to make the world a better place.

open.substack.com

A decade ago, psychology went to war with itself over replication. For one year, I was the referee, moderating a Facebook group meant to keep the fights civil. Worst year of my academic life. The full story, originally paywalled, is now free: open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

When Psychology Went to War With Itself

A month ago, someone shoved me into a time machine.

open.substack.com

New guest post by my PhD student @hellovic.bsky.social. She writes about her new working paper finding that most Americans don't oppose AI. But those who do treat it as a moral issue, refusing tradeoffs and even money. Why that makes AI debates so hard. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

AI's Fiercest Critics Are Opting Out of the Conversations That Matters Most

This week I’m publishing a guest post by my PhD student, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello.

open.substack.com

New paper out! Some AI companies anthropomorphize their products to boost trust. But does it work? And can anthropomorphism benefit them beyond increased trust? We tested this across two studies. Here's what we found:

There's no other way to say this: PUB DATE! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/745513...

The Last Straight Woman by Phoebe Maltz Bovy: 9780771013027 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A fiercely intelligent, funny, and much-needed reality check on the state of heterosexual women. The Last Straight Woman is a call to set aside the baggage of what female heterosexuality evokes,...

penguinrandomhouse.com

I have a student who is considering putting together a symposium at SPSP on the psychology gleaned from specific films. We'll be covering--what else--The Big Lebowski. Anyone else interested in putting something together?

I want to defend punching down in academia. Scratch that. I want to defend punching, full stop. Up, down, sideways. The norm against critiquing junior scholars publicly comes from a good place but breaks something fundamental about how science works. New essay. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

Science Doesn't Care Who You Are

A few months ago I sat in the audience for a PhD student’s talk that was, well, not great.

open.substack.com

My lab posted a paper on AI opposition. Someone threatened me with a guillotine. The replies proved our findings better than the data did. New post! open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

500,000 Views and a Guillotine Threat

One of my social media posts recently trended on Twitter.

open.substack.com

Are different desires (e.g., food, sleep, alcohol, cannabis) experienced and regulated the same way? We tested this question in a new preprint with Yang Liu, @minzlicht.bsky.social, @wilhelmhofmann.bsky.social, and @kevinmking.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

@nature.com has published three groundbreaking papers on reproducibility, analytical robustness, and replicability across the social sciences. Sincere thanks are due to the many folks who contributed to these projects. It’s painstaking work, and a great service to social science.

Researchers affiliated with SRI at @utoronto.ca (including @semrasevi.bsky.social, Elliot Creager, Matt Ratto, @zhijingjin.bsky.social, & @minzlicht.bsky.social) are part of 8 new CIFAR projects focused on examining AI Safety through the lens of social sciences & the humanities. shorturl.at/NAwej

CIFAR awards over $1M to support sociotechnical challenges in AI safety - CIFAR

Eight projects announced to receive funding for AI safety research.

shorturl.at

🚨 New preprint with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social! The empathic voice penalty: Vocal delivery reduces perceived empathy in humans and AI osf.io/preprints/ps... We know AI often outperforms humans at text-based empathy—but what happens when emotional support is expressed vocally?

I've known @jayvanbavel.bsky.social and Dominic Packer for 20 years. Partly responsible for me ending up at UofT. They write one of the best psychology Substacks around. This week I'm republishing their piece on the bystander effect and why the Kitty Genovese story isn't what we thought.

The Myth That Made Social Psychology Famous

Social psychology built a whole theory of human callousness on a story that wasn't quite true. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel sort out the myth from the science.

open.substack.com

Qualitative coding 3,183 open-ended responses by hand would take 80+ hours. With an LLM-assisted workflow, Gino Carmona-Díaz and colleagues in Colombia did it in 10. ICC = .824. Full tutorial, prompts, and code are open access. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

An AI-powered research assistant in the lab: A practical guide for text analysis through iterative collaboration with LLMs - Behavior Research Methods

Analyzing texts such as open-ended responses, headlines, or social media posts is a time- and labor-intensive process highly susceptible to bias. However, large language models (LLMs) are promising to...

link.springer.com

18 months ago I wrote about the fall of stereotype threat. It's making rounds again. DominicPacker and @jayvanbavel.bsky.social republished it, Mary Murphy wrote a lengthy rebuttal, and the debate is alive. I have thoughts. For now: the original essay, with one important addition.

Is Stereotype Threat Just Vibes Now?

The title of this newsletter tells you that I use this space to speak my mind.

open.substack.com

We created a new scale to measure AI sycophancy in conversations with no right answer. Three facets: Uncritical Agreement, Obsequiousness, Excitement. People hate the flattery but welcome the enthusiasm. And sycophancy correlated with perceived empathy across every study. arxiv.org/abs/2603.15448

Check out @hellovic.bsky.social's new paper on the moralization of AI: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ort check out a cool infographic of the paper.

Check out my student @hellovic.bsky.social's new paper: The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence With @reemayad.bsky.social, @eloisecote.bsky.social, @yoelinbar.net, and Jason Plaks

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello@hellovic.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🧵 New preprint alert! Why do some people refuse to use AI, even when you tell them it's safe and beneficial? We argue it's not about risk perception. It's about moralization. AI has become a moral issue for many people, and that changes everything. [1/7] osf.io/preprints/ps...