Scott Claessens

@scottclaessens.bsky.social

Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent, interested in cultural evolution, cooperation, and moral psychology with a focus on artificial intelligence.

Causal inference question! We want to know whether there is a causal path from X --> Y. However, both variables likely share unobserved confounds (U). We have developed an experimental manipulation that directly influences X (Z --> X) but not Y (Z ⫫ Y). Can we use Z as an instrumental variable?

Hi new friends! It's great to see the wave of people moving over from the Other Place. I recently started a postdoc at the University of Kent looking at the moral psychology of AI. I'm also interested in cultural evolution, politics, and cooperation. Hoping to share some cool research soon!

Excited to share this new preprint, a collaboration with Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson. What motivates people to punish others? We find that while many people choose not to punish, those who do punish are motivated by egalitarianism rather than deterrence or norm-enforcement.

OSF

osf.io

Now I'm here, I may as well plug our new paper on the non-independence of nations! 🌏 So happy for this to finally be published open-access at Nature Communications. Worth a read if you're thinking of including any cross-national analyses in your next project!

Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations -...

Nations are connected in many ways, yet cross-national analyses often assume they are independent. Here, the authors show that previous studies may not have sufficiently accounted for this non-indepen...

nature.com