The sheer figure of 20% blows my mind. Experts are probably well aware of that. That seems to be a little higher than the chances for russian soldiers to die within one year on the front. And we talk about scaring them away by depriving them of money or putting them in camps. And people think it's

Klaus Pforr@klauspforr.eurosky.social · 5d ago

This working paper looks at the effect of success beliefs among rural Gambians about successfully reaching Europe if they tried to. People *overestimate* the probability of dying en route with 50% instead of the estimated 20%. www.rfberlin.com/network-pape...

🚨 It's published! 🚨 This is the big one. 100 cultures, 12,000 people, 108 researchers. Why people (and our most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.nature.com

New paper out in SBE! Self-employment is linked to lower boredom, a relationship that is not captured by traditional measures of well-being. A less boring life may be an overlooked (an independent) component of the well-being gains from self-employment! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Boredom and psychological well-being among the self-employed - Small Business Economics

Individuals not only seek a happy and meaningful life, but an interesting rather than a boring one. In this paper, we analyze data from 19,000 individuals across 25 European countries to demonstrate t...

link.springer.com

I hope everyone caught this Lancet study confirming that Elon Musk & DOGE are responsible for genocidal levels of suffering & death.

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

thelancet.com

Vaccination is collective action: Vaccination helps others by hindering disease-spread But there is an incentive free-ride: if enough others vaccinate, you don't need to pay those costs In a new paper, we provide new evidence with data from 6+ mil covid-vaccinations: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/7

what on EAAAAAAARTTTTTTHHHHHHHHHHHHH

excited about this one: using longitudinal movement data and dyadic models, we show that orangutan moms adjust their ranging patterns so their kids can play with age-mates independent of kinship, at personal costs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A multinational megastudy of the effects of gratitude practices on subjective well-being | PNAS

Scholars have observed people from a variety of cultures using a variety of gratitude-related practices to change their emotions, outlooks, and soc...

pnas.org

🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨 together with Jürgen Huber & Michael Kirchler: “Massaging Significance in the Age of Open Science: A Satirical Tutorial,” which is a public service for anyone unwilling to let inconvenient data get in the way of a compelling narrative. 😉 Link to preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is why we (@jamiecummins.bsky.social @bethclarke.bsky.social and I) have developed RegCheck, a tool that automatically checks for potential deviations. regcheck.app

RegCheck

RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.

regcheck.app

Every PI

Majestic, well done @rickcarlsson.bsky.social

3 new studies on using psychedelics as treatments for mental disorders just came out; 2 in JAMA Psychiatry, 1 in Lancet Psychiatry. I reviewed one of these submissions. Here are the core results. 🧵

The fee to publish an open access paper at Trends in Cognitive Science is now over $7,000. Seriously, @elsevierconnect.bsky.social ??? For a 4,000 word piece? Talk about a broken system.

Denmark is often portrayed as a fairly equal society, but when looking at the distribution of wealth a different picture emerges. The richest 1% of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 82% combined. Wealth tax is now being debated. #dkmedier #dkpol #dkvalg (oxfam.dk/publikatione...)

Ny analyse: Top 1 pct. har mere formue end 82 pct. af den danske befolkning

En ny opgørelse viser, at de rigeste cirka 48.000 mennesker i Danmark har lige så meget formue som 3,9 millioner danskere tilsammen.

oxfam.dk

Coming up with a post-hoc theory section when your results are weird:

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities. This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

The Lancet@thelancet.com · 7mo ago

AI-enabled stethoscopes show promise for improving diagnosis of cardiovascular conditions, UK trial finds. Explore the research: spkl.io/63326AsjJ8

198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

This too…

Just an aside: 41 of the 100 meta analyses published in Psych Bull between 2023 and 2025 do not include *any* quality screening of identified studies. To the degree that those literatures include bad studies, they are being laundered together with the good ones.

Malte Elson@malte.the100.ci · 8mo ago

But even in Psychological Bulletin, quality assessments were done in 59/100 meta-analyses, and of those 50 had made their data available (47 included study identifiers). As such, /where/ quality ratings are shared, these typically include identifiers.

Positive and negative self-esteem are two (or one?) such offenders that I cover in my blog post. www.the100.ci/2023/06/13/d...

Disentangling the Dark and Bright Side of Constructs with a Bright and Dark Side

This blog post resulted from a draft that was supposed to become a proper article at some point. Michael Dufner and Tailcalled both worked on the draft and contributed important ideas. But, as so ofte...

the100.ci

Drew Engelhardt@amengel.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Too frequently see substantive interpretations given to two dimensional factor analysis solutions where the dimensions instead more likely split on the direction of question wording (i.e., pro-trait vs. con-trait). A classic on such measurement error effects: www.researchgate.net/profile/Dona...

Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life. A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need. Fascinating!

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Mapping the online manipulation economy

A market perspective on digital manipulation may help improve online trust and safety

science.org

Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities

Achal Agrawal is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.

nature.com

🚨STOP, replication time!🚨 Does Feeling “Right” Make the Good More Good (and the Bad More Bad)? Achar & Lee found that when people experience regulatory fit, moral predispositions get amplified—moral folks act more moral, less moral folks act less moral. Big, exciting claim!

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS

Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...

pnas.org