@lewan.bsky.social, Chair in Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, discusses his paper “Rhetorical features from social media predict real-world violent outcomes of manifestos." 2026 Cambridge Disinformation Summit. youtu.be/xz2zMQLqFOY?...

Prof Stephan Lewandowsky research presentation on how social media rhetoric predicts real violence

YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

youtu.be

I was really looking forward to attending the Summit this year, but couldn't make it due to recent events. Fortunately for the lucky audience, @lewan.bsky.social stepped in to present the project (led by @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social and in collaboration w/ Emily Saltz). Hoping to be there next year!

Sander van der Linden@profsanderlinden.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The great Steve Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social presented cutting-edge new work at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit with @almogsi.bsky.social showing how alienating us vs them rhetoric predicts real-world violent outcomes across 145 political manifestos between 1796 & 2024. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our paper is finally out in Cognition! 🎉 We introduce the "CLIP task"—a computerized paradigm for measuring numerical bias in adults: when number and physical size both matter, do you spontaneously rely more on numbers or on physical size?

If you're a psychologist working with text data in R, this package is for you.

Journal of Open Source Software@joss-openjournals.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Just published in JOSS: 'embedplyr: Tools for Working With Text Embeddings' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.08262

This project wouldn’t have come together without the amazing team -- Tomer Zipori and @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social for the heavy lifting and computational analysis, @lewan.bsky.social for his insight, and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social whose vision made this possible. Truly grateful for this!

Sander van der Linden@profsanderlinden.bsky.social · 9mo ago

New Bayesian *Meta-Analysis* of Psychological Inoculation Against Misinformation! Open-access 👇Thread! Buckle up www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ✅We find that prebunking interventions improve people's ability to discern between reliable & unreliable news without causing undue skepticism!

An opportunity to work with the best!

Jana Lasser@janalasser.eurosky.social · 9mo ago

My lab is looking for a Senior Scientist (= PostDoc with option of permanency)! We are looking for someone interested in doing cutting-edge computational social science + helping us with data & software engineering 🤓. See job ad for details jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/7d14...

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

Our new #rstats embeddings tutorial is now published in Psychological Methods! Led by the one and only @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social

Louis Teitelbaum@louisteitelbaum.bsky.social · last yr.

New conceptual review + tutorial on text embeddings out in #APA_Journals w/ @almogsi. Beginner-friendly, but experts will find spicy new takes as well. Tag a colleague who’s still counting words... #RStats #tidyverse #quanteda 1/

For my first BlueSky post I want to share this freshly published paper in PNAS @pnas.org! We show how belief and disbelief shape narrative processing in the brain, not just as opposites of a continuum, but as distinct effects, including a cool truth/belief bias. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My latest column in Science went up yesterday doi.org/10.1126/scie... . I argue that “Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. 1/n

Public health suffers when those in power dismiss knowledge

“Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. In today’s world, we frequently encounter a different variant of this philosophy, perhaps best de...

doi.org

This statement from the NSF is insane. Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false. Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

Only @lewan.bsky.social can distill four years of research into such an insightful 🧵. Proud to have co-authored these works and especially grateful to Segun Aroyehun for leading our latest paper. Collaborated with the fantastic team: @janalasser.bsky.social @fabiocarrella.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

Stephan Lewandowsky@lewan.uk · last yr.

Honest people don’t lie. Or do they? Liars aren’t honest. Or are they? One puzzling conundrum in contemporary politics is that politicians who seem to be estranged from facts and evidence are nonetheless considered honest by their followers. 1/n

1/6 Hello Bluesky! 👋 Excited to join this community and share my new blog. First post: Using Bayesian hierarchical models to rescue "unreliable" cognitive tasks, with the dot-probe task as my case study. cogpsychreserve.netlify.app/posts/dotpro...

We are delighted to invite applications for an open-rank, tenure-track position at the developmental psychology track within the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. For more information, follow the link: bgu-academic-recruitment.my.site.com/Recruiters/V...

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

Free speech, fact checking, and the right to accurate information

True to his campaign promises, on 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a broad range of Executive Orders, the scope of which ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” t...

science.org

Grateful to be a coauthor on this paper led by @fabiocarrella.bsky.social , and part of this terrific team

Fabio Carrella@fabiocarrella.bsky.social · last yr.

How politicians communicate shapes online discourse in ways we might overlook. Our new paper shows that their choice between a fact-based (evidence-driven) and a belief-based (sincerity-driven) honesty creates a "contagion" effect, influencing how users engage and respond. ⬇️(1/8)

Steve has summarized more than four years of work into this thread. Interested in microtargeting? Check it out!

Stephan Lewandowsky@lewan.uk · 2y ago

Does microtargeting work? The idea that people can be manipulated by political messages that are furtively tailored to their personality or other vulnerabilities has triggered much concern. But how well founded are those concerns? 1/n

Our paper is finally out!

Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann)@fintan-smith.bsky.social · 2y ago

Hyper partisan content thrives on social media, increasing affective polarisation and poisoning political discourse. Our new paper @lewan.bsky.social, @almogsi.bsky.social, Dawn Holford, just out in @commspsychol.bsky.social, finds that inoculation interventions may help us tackle the problem. 🧵

🌟🧠💪📝 #BOOSTING: Empowering citizens with behavioral science New, freely available paper in Annual Review of Psychology. PDF: tinyurl.com/boosting2025 For more: scienceofboosting.org @arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social @annualreviews.bsky.social #policy #behavioralscience 1/ 🧵👇

✨ Excited to share our new preprint! ✨ After years of work in @nivreggev.bsky.social 's SCMB lab, we proudly present the Israeli Face Database (IFD)! Special thanks to co-leader @mayanna.bsky.social, @talmoran.bsky.social, and everyone who made this possible. 🙌 🧵 A thread:

In this new article in American Psychologist we respond to critics in detail and clarify two key points for the field; (1) The prevalence of misinformation in society is substantial when properly defined. (2) Misinformation causally impacts attitudes and behaviors. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one for far too long. Outstanding work by @cabels18.bsky.social, @kiiahuttunen.bsky.social, @lewan.bsky.social and Ralph Hertwig. Dedicated to my fellow Israelis, with a glimmer of hope that we might still manage to dodge that bullet

What an amazing project. So happy to see this finally out. Kudos Inon and team!

Michael Gilead@michaelgilead.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨Thrilled to share our new study, led By Dr. Inon Raz, in Cerebral Cortex🚨: "The Future, Before, and After". The ability to imagine things we haven’t done before is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. How do we do it?

Very excited to share a new textbook I am working on (led by Louis Teitelbaum). It's called Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language, and it covers text analysis and social media research w/ example code in R ds4psych.com #css #rstats

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 Michael Gilead & I put forward three principles of a psychologically informed approach to prediction models psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

Happy to see our piece published in SciAm on GenAI and microtargeting w/ @lewan.bsky.social and Matthew Edwards www.scientificamerican.com/article/poli...

Political Ads Can Target Your Personality. Here's What Could Go Wrong

This banner year for elections worldwide may witness the arrival of advertising tailored to your personality

scientificamerican.com

A highly scalable "manipulation machine". Personalized political ads are more persuasive & can be automated on a large scale with AI/chatGPT. Impressive new work from @almogsi.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social 👏 academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...?

Almog Simchon@almogsi.bsky.social · 3y ago

New paper alert! Now on PNAS Nexus: The persuasive effects of political microtargeting in the age of generative AI w/ @lewan.bsky.social and Matthew Edwards doi.org/10.1093/pnas... [1/8]

New paper alert! Now on PNAS Nexus: The persuasive effects of political microtargeting in the age of generative AI w/ @lewan.bsky.social and Matthew Edwards doi.org/10.1093/pnas... [1/8]

What is honesty and truth? New work from Lasser, Aroyehun, Carrella, @almogsi.bsky.social Garcia & Lewandowsky finds that the dissemination of misinformation by US politicians (Republicans) is connected to an alternative understanding of honesty and truth nature.com/articles/s41...