In the last 2 years I (and our lovely collaborators) have been rather obsessively working on Metacheck - a tool to automatically check best practices in papers. In this RIOTS summerschool talk, I walk you through what the tool can do, and future plans www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWd2...

Metacheck: automatically check papers for best practices - Daniel Lakens

Can automated tools help researchers catch problems before their work is published? In this talk from the King’s Open Research Summer School 2026, Professor Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of…

youtube.com

Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries (and 97,220 citizens) They find that a communitarian approach, where societies foster environments that care for others, is highly effective at boosting a nation’s overall happiness. www.psypost.org/scientists-i...,

Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries

What makes a society truly happy? New research in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that supportive, inclusive environments boost national well-being significantly more than individualistic ...

psypost.org

People not in tech have been interested in what happened with the Open AI agent/Hugging Face hack. So, I "Explain it Like I'm 5"-ed it and made a cartoon in 8 panels. Apologies for some anthro-ing. 🫤 m-mitchell.com/HF-hack-cart... 1/8

I do empathize with the stuff journalists in this story are dealing with. That said, don’t self-censor. Just don’t do it. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...

UK journalists ‘self-censoring stories about Trump and the right over safety fears’

Government-backed investigation finds risks are normalised amid ‘a narrowing of the public conversation’

theguardian.com

"What It Means to Be a Mathematician When AI Does the Math" spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathem...

What it Means to Be a Mathematician When AI Does the Math

Researchers debate motivation, purpose, and the field’s future

spectrum.ieee.org

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Active linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNAS

In daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke...

pnas.org

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I p-hacked my early work on prejudice. It never felt like cheating. I now wonder if that's because I believed the cause was good. New essay on why scholar-activism is a dangerous turn for social psychology. If justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

My P-Hacking Felt Like Truth

I became a social psychologist because I wanted to make the world a better place.

open.substack.com

The AI community failed to exit twitter. What implications can we draw about what people believe from this?

What it means that the AI community can't quit twitter

Some quickly jotted thoughts working through the implications of the AI community remaining on twitter

rl-blogging.leaflet.pub

Fact-checking asks too much of people who don't have the time or energy for it. So I built a tool that coaches you through it instead. Introducing the Lateral Reading Companion: readlaterally.com Here's how it works 🧵

"The new book will argue that the mental-health crisis affecting children is real, but has nothing to do with what Gray describes as the 'moral panic' over smartphones and social media. The real problem...has to do with...the Common Core standards" www.theatlantic.com/technology/2... [drink!]

What if It’s Not the Phones?

An evolutionary psychologist is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.

theatlantic.com

At the risk of being a killjoy... the comments + quotes on this seem to interpret it to mean the study found no sex differences in the brain and that isn't really what it says. The paper is way more interesting than that. So I read it and made a thread as I went: 🧵 1/n

Laura Helmuth@laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 4w ago

Male brains and female brains are all just human brains.

Air conditioning has become the latest front in the energy culture war. Depending on who you ask, it is either wasteful excess we must resist or the only sensible response and anyone urging caution is a zealot. A few thoughts in this 🧵

People can be trained to identify AI-generated faces, doubling their accuracy. Instead of focusing on tells, participants were told to focus on gestalt symmetry, proportionality, attractiveness, expressiveness, distinctiveness, and memorability. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/SKqz50ZkHNn

Almost 1 in 4 voters in Europe now votes for a radical right party (23%), up from 7% in 2006 and 11% in 2016. Almost 1 in 3 votes for a populist party. By contrast, only ≈1% now votes for a radical left party, the lowest level since 1989 Source: The PopuList 4.0, via @caterinafr.bsky.social

1/ Scientists often worry that admitting uncertainty will make people trust them less. Better to sound confident. Better to smooth over the doubt. But the evidence points in the opposite direction. 🧵

Climate.us is live. Built by members of the team behind Climate.gov, this new independent nonprofit website keeps trusted climate information easy to find, easy to use, and harder to erase. #ClimateForUs #ClimateUS

The most dangerous charts are the ones you agree with. 📊 "Motivation skepticism is the deployment of critical thinking not as a neutral tool, but as a mechanism to defend prior beliefs." nightingaledvs.com/we-taught-st...

We Taught Students to Read Graphs, but We Forgot to Teach Them to Question Themselves, Nightingale

"Who made this? Yes, I'm asking the source. I have to know, I have to know

nightingaledvs.com

I've spent the last two months putting together this exhaustive analysis of the New York Times coverage of trans people. It covers 3,242 articles over 12 years. In 2022, the NYT shifted towards a hostile stance towards trans people in their framing. www.thedissident.news/exclusive-ho...

Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People

An exhaustive analysis of over 3,242 articles by the New York Times covering transgender issues from 2014-2026 revealed a stark shift towards hostile framing in 2022. In January 2015, the New York Ti...

thedissident.news

For $7 an hour, virtual assistants in the Philippines are using AI to write LinkedIn posts and comments on behalf of Western executives, fueling a "thought leadership" content mill https://restofworld.org/2026/virtual-assistant-linkedin-engagement/?utm_campaign=row-social

The Filipino virtual assistants behind LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” content mill

For $7 an hour, virtual assistants use AI tools to write LinkedIn posts and comments on behalf of Western executives.

restofworld.org

New preprint w/ @akalt.bsky.social, Juliane Schubert, Nathan Weisz, & @clarepress.bsky.social 🎉 Predictive-brain accounts treat "prediction error" as one signal. We find it's two jobs, in two dissociable systems. And one of them you can watch in the pupil, as people listen to a story. 🧵 (1/9)

(Some) writers appreciate LLM writing assistance but readers hate it. Survey says… writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reacti... If readers suspect AI, they not only stop reading, but also downvote/avoid the author.

Okay so I read the whole working paper behind this claim. I’m going to accept the causal analysis as-is and explain why I still don’t think this makes sense. Starting with: the comparison is between counties with vs. without lots of iPhone network coverage, NOT owning vs. not owning an iPhone 🧵

NPR@npr.org · 2mo ago

Are smartphones causing people to have fewer children? A provocative new working paper explores the persistent drop in birth rates since the iPhone was introduced nearly two decades ago.

I wrote a piece for the Yale Review on AI and "jagged intelligence". (Note: headline was not written by me.) yalereview.org/article/mela...

Melanie Mitchell: What We Get Wrong About AI

Melanie Mitchell probes the jagged landscape of AI and its uncertain future.

yalereview.org

Bari Weiss tried to get “60 Minutes” to make Minneapolis protestors look more violent, AFTER the Feds killed two of us. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/m... (Gift link)

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.

doi.org

I've worked in Democratic digital comms for a long time and pay attention to campaign metrics across platforms. Increasingly I'm seeing Dems who crosspost on X, Bluesky, and Threads get better engagement on Bluesky even with far fewer followers. Here's @jamestalarico.bsky.social's clip last night:

I see a lot of charts everyday. Few make me go: THIS IS CRAZY. www.carbonbrief.org/ai-boom-mean...

The drop in support for marriage equality last year was not a blip, it has declined further, dropping 6 points from its high of 71. Whether or not gay or lesbian relations were "morally acceptable" dropped 9 points. Support for LGBTQ rights broadly is diminishing. news.gallup.com/poll/710810/...

How the media hypes “research that is absurd on its face”

How the media hypes “research that is absurd on its face”

Aaron Brown says his new book, Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth from a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation, “isn’t an exposé of fraud—Retraction Watch covers that ground. It’s abo…

retractionwatch.com