Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵
Jan Pfänder
@janpfa.bsky.social
phd student https://janpfander.github.io/
Friday (July 3), 14:30, Room Dresde: @lenazohm.bsky.social shares her work on “expert trespassing” in a very cool symposium organized by @cruzf.bsky.social, incl. further talks about science reception and communication by him, @janpfa.bsky.social, and Arne Stolp. Add it to your agenda! 📋
1/ "Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. The updated version of this preprint is now online! THREAD🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples": synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents. However, producing these samples requires many analyti...
arxiv.org
Jamie Cummins@jamiecummins.bsky.social · 11mo agoCan large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵
🚨Next week's talk at ARC Join us for a talk presented by Dr. Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). 📅 21 May 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online See the link for details👇 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/45727...
ARC Talk: Jan Pfänder, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag): Strengthening Trust in Climate Scientists in the US: A Megastudy Approach
mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Updated my textbook with a cleaner lay-out, better accessibility, and eight new interactive visualizations made completely in html (such as this illustration of the positive predictive value). lakens.github.io/statistical_...
Taking a look at Castro-Schilo & Grimm about "residualized change vs diff scores" -- interesting case of how spelling out estimands affects reasoning. Estimand of interest: "effect of prior cohabitation on change in relationship satisfaction pre/post marriage"> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Nicholas Judd@njudd.com · 5mo agoNice Post! Odd citation in the ANCOVA footnote for the change in observational analyses. I feel like it warrants a sentence on how this gives easy, large false positives: Van Breukelen, 2006; Sorjonen et al., 2019 & my absolute favorite, must read, Castro-Schilo, & Grimm, 2018
The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!
My first paper is out today in Environmental Research Letters. Wildfire smoke doesn't just harm your lungs; it's also linked to violence. Using 11 years of data from Seattle, I find that smoke days see 3.6% more violent assaults. 🧵 A short thread on what was found. doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae436c
"the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper." Retraction of 2023 paper that did not use the reported variables. The replication report is astonishing www.nature.com/articles/s41... Pre-publication peer review remains undefeated in laundering bullshit
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 · 5mo agoAI-enabled stethoscopes show promise for improving diagnosis of cardiovascular conditions, UK trial finds. Explore the research: spkl.io/63326AsjJ8
🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴 Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout ! 📌 www.gallicagram.com
Breaking news: The #NCCR #CLIM+ on "Climate Extremes & Society" will be funded by the @snf-fns.ch in the coming 4 years! With 47 PIs, 20 institutions & 22 stakeholders from #health to #finance & #agriculture, it will unite climate expertise from both natural & social science! nccr-climplus.ch
What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5
Played around with Causion by @isager.bsky.social It's an impressive teaching tool for causal inference... and it also really pretty. Amazing color scheme and slick interface. Shown below a demonstration of an extended front-door DAG in Causion.
🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!
Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵 regcheck.app
RegCheck
RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.
regcheck.app
Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry? New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com. Thread tomorrow. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507
Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research
To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...
arxiv.org
We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n
Interesting megastudy on the (in)effectiveness of climate messaging: tiny effects on attitudes, no effects on donation www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Persuasiveness varied little across party lines", another win for Persuasion in Parallel @aecoppock.bsky.social
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages - Nature Climate Change
How to effectively communicate climate change to the public has long been studied and debated. Through a registered report megastudy, researchers tested the ten most-cited climate change messaging str...
nature.com
1. Transparency is necessary for credibility 2. Transparency is hard to change 3. Require transparency* 4. Transparency is not magic 5. Journals are part of problem 6. Expect more from journals 7. Peer review is not magic 8. A crisis can look a lot like „normal“ science 9. Meta-analysis is not magic
Peer Community In@peercommunityin.bsky.social · 8mo agoIn case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!
🚨 Mapping climate change coverage In a new preprint, Simon Wimmer, @jmbh.bsky.social, and I analyzed over 50,000 articles about climate change from major German newspapers across the political spectrum (2010-2024) using large language models 🧵 🔗 Link: osf.io/preprints/so...
Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc). They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee! Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Strain explorer β: pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo... #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicSky
Erik Angner@erikangner.com · 8mo ago"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se
We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
Trust in science is increasingly being studied across the globe—which is good news. However, expanding geographic coverage alone isn’t enough. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
Redirecting
doi.org
There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...
new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
🚨Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions In a new preprint, @colognaviktoria.bsky.social, @maiensachis.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social & I examine techno-optimism among 9,199 scientists and how it relates to their civic engagement and lifestyle choices🧵 🔗 Link: tinyurl.com/hh94huzv
