Stoked to read this:

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · 5d ago

Autopsies of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests often conclude that movements produced tough-on-crime backlash. My new study in Work and Occupations finds a different kind of movement outcome: BLM changed how local reporters cover cops and jails. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The issue in that piece isn’t how open science and science reform initiatives are funded worldwide, the issue is that *in United States* these topics have been co-opted by a donor class that has a vested interest in discrediting science. Reading comprehension is your friend

McGill social psych is now officially hiring at the assistant prof level, hooray Happy to chat with anyone about the position mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

For neuroscience PhDs with a strong interest in teaching and mentoring: MIT is hiring a scientific program manager to support activities around a new NIH neuroscience PhD training grant. Salary range $91k - $129k #NeuroJobs careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Scientific Program Manager

MIT - Scientific Program Manager - Cambridge MA 02139

careers.peopleclick.com

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

We are hiring an assistant professor in Metascience! Join our lovely department of Human-Technology Interaction, with a very active Metascience group, at Eindhoven University of Technology. Apply here before August 14, or share the vacancy in your network! www.tue.nl/en/working-a...

Assistant Professor in Metascience

Personal type: Scientific staff

tue.nl

"If scientists align with campaigns that pitch their opponents as anti-science, they should not be surprised if greater polarization is the result." I have some real strong thoughts on this piece. Let's talk about it... 1/? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Scientists should recognize their own political biases to build public trust

Public trust in science can’t be sustained by the support of narrow constituencies at one end of an ideological spectrum.

nature.com

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

Glad to see this story and coverage of an important paper. www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n... 1/16

NIH diversity programs doubled undergraduates’ odds of getting a Ph.D., 20-year study finds

A new study found that two diversity-oriented programs supported by the NIH doubled the odds that an undergraduate would earn a Ph.D.

statnews.com

8 anti-ICE protesters received sentences from 30 to 100 years, with several receiving 50 years or more. The harsh sentencing is meant to be a warning that intimidates activists around the country. 🧵

TIL the Haribo Starmix gummy candies sold in Italy contain no artificial food coloring dyes like red 40, yellow 5 (nor any preservatives) because the EU regulated these additives after the 2007 Southampton study but neither US nor Canada regulated, so the ones manufactured here are still toxique

Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups Perspective by Paul A. M. Van Lange & Paul K. Bergmann bit.ly/4eFHMjK #psychscisky #socialpsych

Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups - Nature Reviews Psychology

There is ample empirical evidence that humans are cooperative, but there is also evidence that humans can be distrustful, hostile and aggressive. In this Review, Van Lange and Bergmann reconcile this ...

bit.ly

Rather than submitting papers to (or reviewing for) Frontiers journals, consider these alternatives: -PLOS -Collabra -eLife -OpenMind

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...

journals.sagepub.com

🎉New paper🎉 Led by Sue Cha, we used data from the UK HLS to identify how energy costs disproportionately affect the physical health of those with lower income and lower educational attainment Important work as we consider energy hardships worldwide www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rising natural gas and electricity prices: Longitudinal evidence on physical health and socioeconomic vulnerability

Rising energy prices complicate how individuals navigate life. Prior studies have largely conceptualized energy prices as an economic pressure linked …

sciencedirect.com

I'll be recruiting PhD students (2027 entry) and a postdoc to join the lab at Berkeley. Interests: • continuous person perception in interactive contexts • impression management and its biases • social perception in digital spaces Get in touch if there's overlap. Very excited for this next chapter!

I’d like to add something else to this convo: many of people who qualify for permanent residency in the United States would no longer qualify if they went home — because their existing visa is on the basis of refugee status (fear of home) or a job they’d lose. Like it’s absurd at every level.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨 🚨 🚨 NEW: A shocking @USCIS memo seems to declare that hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in this country and applying for green cards must instead apply for visas abroad; which could MASSIVELY disrupt lives. 🧵 on what we know, and what we don’t.

Adding pointless administrative burdens to deter legal immigration

Mark Histed@markhisted.org · 2mo ago

If their goal is to choke off economic advantages from the US’s university system it’s hard to think of a more effective way. Scientists and other academics come to the US to study— then stay in the US often via green cards, to start companies, do unique work, and contribute to the US economy.

Politicians endlessly blame immigration for their own failures. So, when immigration is reduced, their ‘success’ isn’t recognised. No one’s life has particularly improved. Because no one’s life was ever going to improve by reducing immigration. Because our problems were never caused by immigration.

Alex Andreou@sturdyalex.bsky.social · 3mo ago

So we have full 2025 immigration stats - Total net down by 2/3rds in 2025 (3/4 from peak) - Small boat arrivals in 2026 down 40%. Asylum backlog down 48%; returns up 9% - Asylum seekers in hotels down 35% (down 48% from peak) YET PUBLIC PERCEPTION 49% think 2025 saw increase; only 16% know it fell

Thrilled to be sharing my latest work at #CogSci2026! Many of the spaces we move through, from kitchens to airports, were designed with specific uses in mind. How do people create such environments, and how do users figure out what they were designed for? 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

My (very) short piece on how prenatal experience with the mother's voice may rapidly scaffold the development of face perception in newborn infants is now out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

Relationships as Microcultures is a new theoretical perspective on what it fundamentally means to be in a close relationship. It’s been a dream working on it with this amazing team of scholars, and I’m so excited that the preprint is ready to share. See Maya’s thread and link to it below!

Maya Rossignac-Milon@mrossignacmilon.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Pleased to see our work published: The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies. Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter. doi.org/10.1017/S095...

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

Here's a Society Workshop report about using AI models to learn about a new area of knowledge (in this case the psych of inequality). My favorite part of this was when GEMINI referred to our research as "Kraussian" -- the first time it has been referred to in that way (except in my mind, perhaps).

Society Workshop@societyworkshop.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Here is our case report of AI use when learning about a new are of knowledge. Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ULcL...