Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Defending Cofnas, who had written outrageously racist stuff for years (e.g., that in a meritocracy there would be next to no Black professors because they have lower IQs), is an odd hill to die on. Yet the 100-plus academics who signed this letter are clearly willing to die on it :/

Rebecca Sear@rebeccasear.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Also worth noting how many of the signatories of the letter defending Cofnas call themselves evolutionary psychologists, including those with gatekeeping roles or large public platforms. Concerning to have the discipline represented by those who, at very best, misunderstand academic freedom

Just updated my critique of Lynn's 'national IQ' data; a core plank of scientific racism for decades. Includes a response to recent defences of the datasets. Conclusion remains the same: ‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability worldwide

🤔 I really wish more of the discourse around Cofnas, Yarvin, Musk, Thiel etc and their successful lynching of a Black academic would refer to @quinnslobodian.com's "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" tracing Silicon Valley's route from Ayn Rand to 'race science.'

If you just happened to pick this week to start yelling about the importance of academic freedom, I sure hope you did more than watch silently for the past 18 months as the Trump administration assaulted everything from mRNA vaccine research to gender studies to the very idea of having universities.

I’m hiring a PhD student to work with me on metascience in psychology at @zpid.bsky.social! The position is very open - could cover a wide range of topics/themes 🤸🏻‍♀️✨ If you have questions, please reach out! Applications are open until October 1st. leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/en/job/fyjwt...

PhD in Psychological Meta-Science (m/f/d)

Become part of the open science movement The Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) in Trier (Germany) is an internationally recognized research-based psychology service center located in...

leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs

Also worth noting how many of the signatories of the letter defending Cofnas call themselves evolutionary psychologists, including those with gatekeeping roles or large public platforms. Concerning to have the discipline represented by those who, at very best, misunderstand academic freedom

Ehud@duhe.bsky.social · 5mo ago

They always have to promote bastardized evolutionary tropes, making a mockery of the most beautiful of the sciences.

Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · last wk.

I mean, c'mon. What this data shows is (a) there's a huge number of students using AI and not studying for very long compared to peers; and (b) negligible "benefits" for students who did study for comparable time periods and used AI.

Sasha Gusev has a great new blog post on faculty hiring during the DEI era. Remarkable how much backlash there has been to what was an tiny and temporary bump in hiring Black, Latino, and Native faculty of about 1 person per R1 campus theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-actua...

New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

In recent weeks, Black communities have noted a disturbing pattern of Black people dying in mysterious ways, and local officials jumping to early conclusions about the causes of death. “A Crimson Record exposes the hidden truth about modern-day lynchings, thegrio.com/2026/08/10/b... #BlackskyNews

Black people are being found hanging from trees. Why are officials so quick to call it suicide?

Tasia Fortune's death is the latest in a string of cases across the country, drawing scrutiny over how officials investigate Black deaths.

thegrio.com

The Jason Arday saga made me furious and sad in equal measure so I wrote about it. The whole thing is deeply unpleasant. gidmk.substack.com/p/the-jason-...

The Jason Arday Saga Is Terrible And Everyone Involved Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves

The whole thing makes me furious

gidmk.substack.com

I found this piece incredibly compelling: media ownership affects content, which affects attitudes and behavior. "Smart" types like journalists are not immune to these effects. Why did Musk buy twitter and make it a worse business? For political influence. Same argument as my new working paper!

Vincent Bevins@vincentbevins.bsky.social · 2w ago

Elon Musk obviously succeeded. The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout --- North South Notes: www.northsouthnotes.org/p/the-vibe-s...

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

New working paper w/ Hanna Folsz In Jan 2025 Trump issued an executive order targeting corporate DEI programs. Many companies ended DEI fearing financial risk We find that firms that kept DEI performed just as well in financial markets, revenue, etc democracypolicylab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...

Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.

Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned

Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.

aiddata.org

For reassurance, the changes to OSF have no impact on PsyArXiv (and other preprint communities hosted by the Center for Open Science), which will continue to operate as normal blog.psyarxiv.com/2026/08/11/w...

Brian Nosek@briannosek.bsky.social · 2w ago

Over the next several months, we will phase out some popular OSF features. These changes do not affect current public content, which remains safe and accessible. We have prepared support material to help users adapt. I am very sorry for the disruption to your work. Please read this post for details.

Further to this: the news about OSF is the perfect time to recommend @re3data.bsky.social, the Registry of Research Data Repositories - you can search for potential repositories for your data, and filter the results by a vast number of repo features (e.g., does the repo offer versioning or not)

Steve Kambouris@steve-kambouris.bsky.social · 2w ago

My single top recommendation would be Zenodo (zenodo.org), but there are other very good options, such as Dryad (datadryad.org) and the Dataverse (dataverse.org), which is deployed by institutions (for Australia, see dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataverse/ada)

Over the next several months, we will phase out some popular OSF features. These changes do not affect current public content, which remains safe and accessible. We have prepared support material to help users adapt. I am very sorry for the disruption to your work. Please read this post for details.

OSF Changes | Center for Open Science

We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...

cos.io

Alright, I'm going to do a thread about this: Race science is objectively, scientifically incorrect, even if we set aside the obvious moral arguments against it. "Race realists" love to accuse anti-racists of relying on ethical arguments over "hard facts", so let's use only hard facts.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3w ago

Ifollowed sports science and related discourse for decades and there's always been an undercurrent of race science in there, but usually at something of a whisper. over the last few years there seems to be a resurgence of the very overt stuff. this post today from a fairly famous fitness influencer

Special issue at Psych Science on psychological science in the real world! Send us your best work looking at whether effects from the lab (or from theories) hold up in ecologically valid settings. Submission deadline: 15 January 2027 www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Special Issue Call for Submissions: “From Lab to Life: Psychological Science in the Real World”

Editors: Roni Porat and Vishnu SreekumarPsychological Science invites submissions presenting innovative research that brings psychological science “into the wild,” whether to strengthen its ecological...

psychologicalscience.org

34. THE EXPLOSIVE CHILD (Ross Greene). the only parenting book I've read. Despite the title it's not just about difficult children. wonderful & wise, especially for those of us who had complex childhoods ourselves. "adults are often astounded by what they learn when inquiring about a kid's concerns"

Oh this is a great piece from @add-hawk.bsky.social making the case that play and games are the meaning of life, drawing on The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits www.ft.com/content/7b95...

My organization (@busaracenter.bsky.social) has launched its own ethics review board! busara-iserc.busara.global To my knowledge this will be the first ethics review board specialized in behavioral science on the African continent 1/

"A Spring Meant for Two" by Spanish artist Nadiia Antoniuk.

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

New blog post! Odds ratios are...a bit weird. Here I explain two problems (interpretation, non-collapsibility) and provide some simple recommendations for improved reporting. www.the100.ci/2026/07/30/r...

Reviewer notes: Odds ratios are really odd

When psychological researchers investigate binary outcomes, they routinely report odds ratios to quantify the strength of an effect or an association. This is quite understandable given that psycholog...

the100.ci

Prominent researchers in my field spent over 2 decades telling big stories about the relation between brain & mental health with very little robust data. This has led to really crazy stuff like this, impossible if we had not normalized this bizarre storytelling. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

A scientist says he can scan prisoners’ brains for signs of evil. Did his disputed science put a man on death row?

Kent Kiehl convinced the US legal system he can find violence in prisoners’ brains. His theories have been since used by defense lawyers – with grave consequences for prisoners

theguardian.com

Thanks, indeed, all evidence points to researchers just not caring about sample diversity. Here is a punchier version of the paper you linked to, open access available here. osf.io/preprints/ps...