🚨 Out now in TICS How can language models help cognitive science? @ruimata.bsky.social & I outline 5 uses: mapping research fields, formalizing theories, cleaning up constructs & measures, predicting behavior across tasks, and capturing environmental variation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

*JOB* My group at @gesis.org has an open position: we are looking for a candidate to support the expansion of our Trusted Research Environment for providing access to sensitive research data: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2707934?...

Research Infrastructure Specialist (Postdoc) for Trusted Research Environments (DSS-26) | Jobs at GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

GESIS is one of the world's leading social science infrastructure facilities, supporting researchers at all levels of their research projects with expertise and infrastructure services. We help ensure...

gesis.jobs.personio.de

**Please repost** If you're enjoying Paper Skygest -- our personalized feed of academic content on Bluesky -- we'd appreciate you reposting this! We’ve found that the most effective way for us to reach new users and communities is through users sharing it with their network

Fantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

Large language models (LLMs) are used by over a billion people globally, most often to assist with writing. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing, b...

arxiv.org

While we are still waiting for the final funding decision (which will be made by the BMFTR) for RIDLOP, we are delighted to see the Wissenschaftsrat's report that was published yesterday. So keeping our fingers crossed for the last steps in the evaluation process!

GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften@gesis.org · last wk.

#RIDLOP #Wissenschaftsrat #ResearchInfrastructure The German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) supports the implementation of RIDLOP, the Research Infrastructure for Data from Large Online Platforms, in its statement published today.

Are you curious about using LLMs to simulate or impute survey responses? In our tutorial next week at @ic2s2.bsky.social , we'll talk about some of the potentials, challenges, and open questions in this area.

Georg Ahnert @IC2S2@ahnert.eurosky.social · 2w ago

Excited to present a tutorial on simulating survey responses with LLMs at @ic2s2.bsky.social next week! ✨ 👉 central themes: analytic flexibility & hybrid samples with @gligoric.bsky.social, @indiiigo.bsky.social, @maximiliankreutner.bsky.social, @jrupprec.bsky.social, and @mstrohm.bsky.social – 🧵

New paper out now 🥳 When psychologists discuss generalisability, they often refer to vague notions of representativeness. We provide an accessible intro to the total survey error framework as a tool to reason about this more rigorously. w @taymalsalti.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci >

📢 Second Call for Papers! The 7th Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP #GeBNLP returns, co-located with AACL 2026. This time fully remote! 🚀 Still time to submit! 🗓️

WE ARE HIRING! Come work with us (me + @malte.the100.ci) on developing and validating RegCheck. PhD or postdoc applications welcome. Folk with backgrounds in meta-science, psychology, (pre)clinical trials, and/or economics are especially invited to apply. jobs.unibe.ch/job-vacancie...

PhD Student/ Postdoc Position in Meta-Science - Universität Bern

Universität Bern is looking for PhD Student/ Postdoc Position in Meta-Science

jobs.unibe.ch

We have bigger models. Bigger conferences. Have our questions become bigger, too? That was the question I posed in my Presidential Address at #ACL2026 in San Diego. (1/6)

🚨 New preprint Do LLMs have stable dispositions measurable using instruments designed for humans? Led by @jelenameyer.bsky.social, our new preprint shows that LLM responses are driven by response bias, rendering their psychological profiles method artifacts. @dgarcia.eu @arc-mpib.bsky.social

Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A 🧵 on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool." www.amacad.org/publication/...

1/ Excited to report we have a new paper out @nature.com today! The bottom line: training data for LLMs does not just fall from the sky - it is created in the context of existing social political institutions - and that has consequences for LLM output. nature.com/articles/s41...

State media control influences large language models - Nature

Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...

nature.com

Attention #NLProc researchers, the EACL 2027 website is officially LIVE: 2027.eacl.org! 🎉 🇬🇷 Join us in Athens, Greece (Mar 9-13, 2027) at #EACL2027 📅 ARR submission deadline: Aug 6, 2026. Open to all areas of CL/NLP + related fields. Stay tuned for the detailed CfP soon!

Join us in three hours (17:00 Berlin time) as we discuss AI-generated images for factorial survey experiments @nschwitter.bsky.social!

Verena Kunz@verenakunz.bsky.social · 3mo ago

We're excited that @nschwitter.bsky.social will join us for the next session of the TADA Spring Speaker Series to present work on AI-generated images as experimental treatments. When? **Thursday**, April 30, 17:00 (Berlin time) Sign up for our newsletter at tada.cool for the Zoom link!

As part of the special issue Explanation and Causality in Sociology, @rubac.bsky.social, @cklamm.bsky.social and I discussed what it takes to do causal inference with text as data - whether we try to explain texts, treat them as causes, or use them as controls 💬🔍👉 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Text as Data and Causal Inference in Sociology - KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

This article discusses and showcases approaches to causal inference with text as data, focusing on the challenges and opportunities that arise when sociological constructs are embedded in language. We...

link.springer.com

We are delighted to welcome @marlutz.bsky.social to our lab over the next few months! 🎉 She'll work on the representation of different demographic groups in LLMs. #NLProc

New📄(accepted at #ACL2026NLP main): W&C-Sent: 1.6k+ English sentences from social media labeled for perceived warmth (trust, sociability) & competence toward individuals and target groups (key for studying stereotypes, biased lgge, & other #NLP and #CSS applications). arxiv.org/abs/2601.06316

Annotating Dimensions of Social Perception in Text: The First Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence

Warmth (W) (often further broken down into Trust (T) and Sociability (S)) and Competence (C) are central dimensions along which people evaluate individuals and social groups (Fiske, 2018). While these...

arxiv.org

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

Algorithmic Bias

oecs.mit.edu

Chapter 7: @kwelle.bsky.social of @gesis.org & @indiiigo.bsky.social of Mannheim on using social media data in CSS. Social media provides rich digital traces of human behavior, but also raises serious methodological & ethical challenges, from platform bias to reproducibility. A great guide!

Taha Yasseri@tahayasseri.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Chapter 6: @lauraknelson.bsky.social from UBC Sociology on computational inductive research. The chapter makes a strong case that unsupervised methods don’t replace theory: they reshape how we generate & validate it. Induction, abduction, deduction, combined with transparency & reproducibility.

Are you using survey-style questionnaires designed for humans to measure characteristics of LLMs? In our #EACL2026 paper, we evaluate both the reliability and validity of such tests and found that their scores do not reflect real-world model behavior. In fact, they can be deceptive! 🧵1/3

🚨 TADA Speaker Series Spring 2026 schedule is here! 🚨 We've assembled a fantastic lineup of researchers exploring the future of survey research in the age of LLMs. Mar 18 - May 27, online at 17:00 CEST. Join us! More info & signup: tada.cool

📢 Last call for abstracts! Submit your work to the DACH-CSS Conference 2026, May 21–22 in Vienna, hosted by CSH & CEU. Accepted abstracts: 3-minute talk + poster session. 🗓 Deadline: TODAY (Feb 20) 📝 Registration open Details: computational-social-science.org/workshops/20... #CSS #DACH #Vienna

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Announcing our latest paper: CommonLID In collaboration with @commoncrawl.bsky.social @mlcommons.org @jhu.edu we built a LID benchmark on actual Common Crawl text covering 109 languages. Existing evaluations overestimate how well LangID works on web data. arxiv.org/abs/2601.18026

CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data of...

arxiv.org

cool, my fellow colleagues @kwelle.bsky.social and @indiiigo.bsky.social also contributed a chapter www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/b...

Taha Yasseri@tahayasseri.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now! @elgarpublishing.bsky.social

We're excited about the next edition of our Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology, this time organized by the 💫 local team in Mannheim!

Melanie Sauter@melinscribe.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🚨 Join us for the next edition Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology in Mannheim 🚨 7 days of hands-on advanced methods + networking for PhDs, postdocs & early-career researchers. Free of charge (limited travel support). Deadline 1 March 2026: summerschoolwpm.org #methodsky #polisky

#cometoGESIS #workwithus #Gastforschungsaufenthalt #researchvisit We invite Ph.D. students and early career postdocs to come to GESIS. Visiting researchers of the Junior Research Program are involved in our research to publish with GESIS staff, and to develop research ideas and joint projects.

Paper accepted to #EACL2026 main conference 🎉 @taniseceron.bsky.social, Sebastian Padó and I test multilingual LLMs before and after English-only fine-tuning and find strong cross-lingual political opinion transfer across five Western languages. www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.05553

Demographic cues (eg, names, dialect) are widely used to study how LLM behavior may change depending on user demographics. Such cues are often assumed interchangeable. 🚨 We show they are not: different cues yield different model behavior for the same group and different conclusions on LLM bias. 🧵👇