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Robert Böhm

@robertboehm.bsky.social

Behavioral scientist studying judgment and decision making in response to societal challenges; robertboehm.info; Professor @univie.ac.at & @uniinnsbruck.bsky.social; Director https://whocc-sabrar.univie.ac.at; Co-director https://health.univie.ac.at/en/

151 Posts3601 Follower 1739 Folgt

Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 4d ago

Psychological Science is running a special issue on "Advancing Psychological Science using Large Language Models", co-edited by me and @ruben.the100.ci. Check out the calls for submissions below! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Special Issue Call for Submissions: “Advancing Psychological Science using Large Language Models”

Editors: Jamie Cummins and Ruben C. ArslanPsychological Science invites submissions for a special issue on psychological science involving large language models. We welcome theoretically and empirical...

psychologicalscience.org

Dalmeet Singh Chawla @dalmeet.bsky.social · last wk.

Papers with publicly available peer-review reports are less likely to be retracted than are those without public reports, a new study has found. My latest for @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... @aidybarnett.bsky.social, @jeroenson.bsky.social, @jessicapolka.bsky.social

Papers with open peer-review reports are less likely to be retracted

Researchers say that transparent publishing practices could be associated with research quality, but more evidence is needed.

nature.com

Alina Schneider @schneali.bsky.social · last wk.

🚨 New in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social: Willful ignorance in the context of antibiotic prescribing New paper together with @miroslavsirota.bsky.social, @riangross.bsky.social, Lars Korn, @elisie.bsky.social, @corneliabetsch.bsky.social, and @robertboehm.bsky.social! Link: doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

Lenni @leonhardreiter.bsky.social · 4w ago

1/ 🚨 New preprint 🚨 How can governments implement effective—but often unpopular—policies without triggering public backlash? We investigated whether involving citizens in policymaking can reduce resistance to system-level policies. 🧵 Preprint: lnkd.in/dQGy47u4

Anne Eich @anneic.bsky.social · 4w ago

New Preprint! osf.io/preprints/ps... New working paper with @qinyuxiao.bsky.social , @hannesrusch.bsky.social and @robertboehm.bsky.social . In our new study we compare two approaches to measuring parochialism. (1/5)

OSF

osf.io

Qinyu Xiao @qinyuxiao.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New working paper with @robertboehm.bsky.social: it is an early version likely needing significant revision, so feedback is very much appreciated. We review multi-level games: a family of economic games that capture tensions within and between groups simultaneously. (1/5) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

OSF

doi.org

European Association of Personality Psychology @eapp-official.bsky.social · 2mo ago

❗️A new blog post on collective punishment -Is it effective? Read the blog post: ejp-blog.com/blog/2026/5/... Read the article: doi.org/10.1177/0890... Authors: @schildchristoph.bsky.social, @laulilleholt.bsky.social, @robertboehm.bsky.social and Ingo Zettler

When everyone pays for the wrongdoings of a few: Does collective punishment work? — The EJP Blog

A guest post by Christoph Schild A handful of football fans light flares or storm the pitch. In response, the governing body bans all supporters of that team from attending the next match. A few in...

ejp-blog.com

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A wonderful evening with my team at our summer event…celebrating our wins, reflecting on our lessons, and appreciating the people who make it all possible. #BestTeam #ThisIsVienna

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Ich hatte große Freude mit @pellegrinivalentin.bsky.social für seinen Podcast "Wissenswirt" über unsere verhaltenswissenschaftliche Forschung zu sozialen Herausforderungen zu sprechen. Hört doch mal in diese und andere Folgen des Podcasts rein: open.spotify.com/episode/5Kk9...

Was hat ein Psychologe mit Antibiotikaresistenzen zu tun? | Prof. Dr. Robert Böhm

open.spotify.com

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨 New in @science.org: CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines Link to the publication: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... I’m excited to share this paper, which I wrote together with @schneali.bsky.social, @corneliabetsch.bsky.social & @laulilleholt.bsky.social (1/5)

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨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...

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🚨NEUER ARTIKEL🚨 im #Bundesgesundheitsblatt zusammen mit @riangross.bsky.social, Lars Korn, @schneali.bsky.social, @elisie.bsky.social & @corneliabetsch.bsky.social doi.org/10.1007/s001... (1/4)

Antibiotikaeinsatz: Psychologische Einflussfaktoren auf die Wahrnehmung und das Verhalten von Ärzt*innen und Patient*innen - Bundesgesundheitsblatt - Gesundheitsforschung - Gesundheitsschutz

Antibiotic resistance threatens the effectiveness of standard therapies. The dynamics of antibiotic resistance are substantially affected by inappropriate antibiotic use. Therefore, this article place...

doi.org

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 6mo ago

It‘s ball season in Vienna. We had a great time at the Science Ball #Wissenschaftsball @schneali.bsky.social @anneic.bsky.social @riangross.bsky.social and many more

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New paper led by @leonhardreiter.bsky.social titled "Country-level differences in socio-economic development and cultural dimensions are associated with workers' economic expectations of AI" out now in Computers in Human Behavior Reports 👇

Lenni@leonhardreiter.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚀 My first PhD paper is out! I'm glad to share my first PhD publication: "Country-level differences in socio-economic development and cultural dimensions are associated with workers' economic expectations of AI", published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports (OA: doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...).

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🎄 New paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (early Christmas gift!) 🎄 "Engaging the unengaged: Differential effects of AI-driven climate communication across audiences" together with Adéla Plechatá and Guido Makransky. doi.org/10.1016/j.je... (1/5) 🧵👇

Sabrina Norwood @sabrinanorwood.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Text reads: About synthetic panels
Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels.

Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey.

Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads:
Discussion
The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002)
of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

David Lazer @davidlazer.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com: 1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science. 2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour

Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

nature.com

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 together with @schildchristoph.bsky.social, @laulilleholt.bsky.social, and Ingo Zettler: "Testing the effectiveness and endorsement of collective punishment." Published in the European Journal of Personality, find it here: doi.org/10.1177/0890...

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚨NEW PAPER🚨 led by @qinyuxiao.bsky.social, with @simoncolumbus.bsky.social and me: "Self-serving intergroup aggression escalates and prevails over parochial cooperation." It's now published in Evolution and Human Behavior by @humbehevosoc.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 8mo ago

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 in @cp-iscience.bsky.social l together with @lukeglowacki.bsky.social, @hannesrusch.bsky.social and Isabel Thielmann: “Untangling altruism and parochialism in human intergroup conflict” doi.org/10.1016/j.is... (1/7)

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Tomorrow marks the start of 🌍 World AMR Awareness Week 2025! We’ll be sharing insights from our AMR research as psychologists at @univie.ac.at @ipb.bsky.social @unierfurt.bsky.social and BNITM. Like/share this post for updates throughout the week! #AMR #WorldAMRAwarenessWeek #WAAW2025

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We're hiring! @univie.ac.at is seeking a TT Assistant Professor in the Psychology of Digitalization. If your work is about automation, AI, or immersive technology (e.g., VR) in the context of work and organizations (broadly defined), we’d love to hear from you. 👇

Universität Wien / University of Vienna @univie.ac.at · 10mo ago

Meilenstein: Die Universität Wien ist erstmals unter den Top 100 im World University Ranking von @timeshighered.bsky.social - auf Platz 95! 🥳 Das stärkt Sichtbarkeit & internationale Vernetzung exzellenter Forschender und Studierender weltweit. #univie #THERanking 👉 www.univie.ac.at/aktuelles/pr...

Foto des Hauptgebäudes der Universität Wien, es fliegt feierliches Konfetti durch das Bild. Rechts unten ist ein Badge zu sehen, auf dem zu lesen ist:
TOP 100
Austrian Excellence, International Impact.
University of Vienna.
THE TOP 100 umranden den Badge.

KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘@kojamf.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 10mo ago

It was a pleasure to provide a keynote talk at this week‘s #ECTMIH conference in #Hamburg. I learned about great research to improve health and had fun with my friends and colleagues @miroslavsirota.bsky.social and @corneliabetsch.bsky.social & her team.

Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour @ipb.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🌍 Vom 29.9.–2.10. sind IPB-Mitglieder bei der #ECTMIH2025 in Hamburg mit Forschung zu Impfverhalten, AMR & Risikokommunikation 📊 🎙️ Keynote von IPB-Fellow @robertboehm.bsky.social „Transforming Health and Climate Communication Through Digital Innovation“ @unierfurt.bsky.social @escmid.bsky.social

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 10mo ago

My PhD student @qinyuxiao.bsky.social has written a wonderful tribute to Gary Bornstein’s influential paper on team games (doi.org/10.1207/S153...) — a paper that remains as relevant today as it was over 20 years ago. You can read Qinyu’s short piece here: doi.org/10.1038/s441...

The multi-level social dilemmas of intergroup interactions - Nature Reviews Psychology

Nature Reviews Psychology - The multi-level social dilemmas of intergroup interactions

doi.org

Robert Böhm @robertboehm.bsky.social · 10mo ago

This rigorous and fully transparent meta-analysis on the impact of herd immunity communication on vaccination intentions and behavior is based on @leonhardreiter.bsky.social's master’s thesis. Couldn’t be prouder of him. ❤️

Lenni@leonhardreiter.bsky.social · 10mo ago

📢 New SysRev + Meta-Analysis out in Health Psychology Review! Together with the amazing Martin Voracek, @corneliabetsch.bsky.social & @robertboehm.bsky.social Do messages about herd immunity increase or decrease vaccination motivation? 🤔 Read more to find out! 🧵 OA: doi.org/10.1080/1743...

Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Can 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 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org