iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Alan Jagolinzer @jagolinzer.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

@lewan.bsky.social, Chair in Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, discusses his paper “Rhetorical features from social media predict real-world violent outcomes of manifestos." 2026 Cambridge Disinformation Summit. youtu.be/xz2zMQLqFOY?...

youtu.be

Prof Stephan Lewandowsky research presentation on how social media rhetoric predicts real violence

YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

I was really looking forward to attending the Summit this year, but couldn't make it due to recent events. Fortunately for the lucky audience, @lewan.bsky.social stepped in to present the project (led by @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social and in collaboration w/ Emily Saltz). Hoping to be there next year!

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Shachar Hochman @hochmanshachar.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Our paper is finally out in Cognition! 🎉 We introduce the "CLIP task"—a computerized paradigm for measuring numerical bias in adults: when number and physical size both matter, do you spontaneously rely more on numbers or on physical size?

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Louis Teitelbaum @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

If you're a psychologist working with text data in R, this package is for you.

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

This project wouldn’t have come together without the amazing team -- Tomer Zipori and @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social for the heavy lifting and computational analysis, @lewan.bsky.social for his insight, and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social whose vision made this possible. Truly grateful for this!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

An opportunity to work with the best!

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Shachar Hochman @hochmanshachar.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Our new #rstats embeddings tutorial is now published in Psychological Methods! Led by the one and only @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social

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Gabriel Braun @gabrielbraun.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

For my first BlueSky post I want to share this freshly published paper in PNAS @pnas.org! We show how belief and disbelief shape narrative processing in the brain, not just as opposites of a continuum, but as distinct effects, including a cool truth/belief bias. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 06/06/2025

My latest column in Science went up yesterday doi.org/10.1126/scie... . I argue that “Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. 1/n

doi.org

Public health suffers when those in power dismiss knowledge

“Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. In today’s world, we frequently encounter a different variant of this philosophy, perhaps best de...

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

היה הכי כיף! תודה רבה על ההזמנה 😊

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Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

This statement from the NSF is insane. Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false. Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Only @lewan.bsky.social can distill four years of research into such an insightful 🧵. Proud to have co-authored these works and especially grateful to Segun Aroyehun for leading our latest paper. Collaborated with the fantastic team: @janalasser.bsky.social @fabiocarrella.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

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Shachar Hochman @hochmanshachar.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

1/6 Hello Bluesky! 👋 Excited to join this community and share my new blog. First post: Using Bayesian hierarchical models to rescue "unreliable" cognitive tasks, with the dot-probe task as my case study. cogpsychreserve.netlify.app/posts/dotpro...

cogpsychreserve.netlify.app

The Dot-Probe Task is Probably Fine – CogPsych Reserve

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Tal Yatziv @talyatziv.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

We are delighted to invite applications for an open-rank, tenure-track position at the developmental psychology track within the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. For more information, follow the link: bgu-academic-recruitment.my.site.com/Recruiters/V...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 06/02/2025

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

science.org

Free speech, fact checking, and the right to accurate information

True to his campaign promises, on 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a broad range of Executive Orders, the scope of which ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” t...

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Grateful to be a coauthor on this paper led by @fabiocarrella.bsky.social , and part of this terrific team

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Steve has summarized more than four years of work into this thread. Interested in microtargeting? Check it out!

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Stefan Herzog @stefanherzog.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

🌟🧠💪📝 #BOOSTING: Empowering citizens with behavioral science New, freely available paper in Annual Review of Psychology. PDF: tinyurl.com/boosting2025 For more: scienceofboosting.org @arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social @annualreviews.bsky.social #policy #behavioralscience 1/ 🧵👇

The image is the cover page of an article from the "Annual Review of Psychology" titled "Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science" by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig. It features a brief abstract, keywords, and publication details. The abstract outlines the concept of "boosting" as a behavioral public policy that emphasizes empowering individuals to make informed decisions, in contrast to "nudging," which subtly steers behavior. The abstract reads:

Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people's agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches.

List with summary points:

1. Behavioral public policy garnered widespread attention with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice.
2. Criticisms of nudging include that it does not promote agency and competences and that it relies—overly optimistically—on the presence of benevolent choice architects.
3. The proliferation of environments threatening people's autonomy, the slow pace of systemic approaches to tackling societal issues, and the intrinsic benefits of empowerment make empowering citizens an indispensable objective of behavioral public policy.
4. Boosting is a behavioral public policy approach to empowerment grounded in evidence from behavioral science that shows that humans’ boundedly rational decision making is not as flawed as the nudging approach assumes.
5. Boosts are interventions that improve people's competencies to make informed choices that conform to their goals, preferences, and desires.
6. In self-nudging boosts, people learn to use architectural changes in their proximate choice environment to regulate their own behavior—that is, they are empowered to adapt their own choice environments.
7. There are boosts to foster core competences in many domains, including finance, online environments, and health, as well as broader, overarching areas, such as motivation, risk, and judgment and decision making. Boosts should be part of a policy mix that also includes system-level approaches.
8. When implementing boosts, policy makers need to avoid the trap of individualizing responsibility and to be mindful that, due to differences in cognition and motivation, inequalities in the desirable effects across boosted individuals may emerge.

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Maayan Trzewik @maayantrzewik.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

✨ Excited to share our new preprint! ✨ After years of work in @nivreggev.bsky.social 's SCMB lab, we proudly present the Israeli Face Database (IFD)! Special thanks to co-leader @mayanna.bsky.social, @talmoran.bsky.social, and everyone who made this possible. 🙌 🧵 A thread:

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Sander van der Linden @profsanderlinden.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

In this new article in American Psychologist we respond to critics in detail and clarify two key points for the field; (1) The prevalence of misinformation in society is substantial when properly defined. (2) Misinformation causally impacts attitudes and behaviors. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

What an amazing project. So happy to see this finally out. Kudos Inon and team!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for putting this together!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for creating this list!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

The book is still a work in progress, and if you spot errors or inaccuracies, please reach out!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

It is designed to cover the very specific topics I'm teaching in my course at BGU, but it should be a pretty useful resource (I hope!) for students and researchers in social sciences who do text as data in R

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

Very excited to share a new textbook I am working on (led by Louis Teitelbaum). It's called Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language, and it covers text analysis and social media research w/ example code in R ds4psych.com #css #rstats

ds4psych.com

Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

To state the obvious -- yes, black-box ML is awesome, LLMs are great, and we do not discourage anyone from using them (I use them all the time). But there is much to gain in transparency, interpretability, and accuracy when integrating theory into our prediction models ✌️

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

In the paper, we provide evidence and examples of each element and how it is implemented in psychological research (Non-paywalled version here www.almogsi.com/my_files/Sim...)

almogsi.com

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

Our key argument is that we shouldn't discount human insight. Psychologically informed decision-making can create robust, nuanced decision support systems by using *informed feature extraction*, *informed priors*, and & *informed data collection*

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

In an already classic paper, Yarkoni & Westfall (2017) suggest several practices psychology should adopt from machine learning. Analogously, we suggest that machine learning (and other disciplines) can also learn from psychology

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 Michael Gilead & I put forward three principles of a psychologically informed approach to prediction models psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

psycnet.apa.org

APA PsycNet

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Sander van der Linden @profsanderlinden.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

A highly scalable "manipulation machine". Personalized political ads are more persuasive & can be automated on a large scale with AI/chatGPT. Impressive new work from @almogsi.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social 👏 academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...?

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

This paper concludes my main postdoc project with @lewan.bsky.social and the great collaboration I had with the rest of the team at Bristol, MPI and Northeastern. Thank you all! @stefanherzog.bsky.social @lorenzspreen.bsky.social @anaskozyreva.bsky.social @brionyswire.bsky.social [8/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

This work complements our previous paper and takes another step towards stressing the need and opening possibilities for developing protections against unethical manipulation in digital spaces [7/8] doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

doi.org

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

The other two studies employed AI to modify ads to appeal to people who are high or low on openness to experience personality trait. The results confirmed the effectiveness of AI in generating targeted content [6/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

The first two studies involved real political ads collected from Facebook and evaluated for their persuasiveness, confirming that ads closely matching an individual's personality are notably more effective [5/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

Our findings consistently demonstrated through 4 studies that political messages crafted to personality traits resonate more with the intended audience. Notably, generative AI can automate this process on a large scale and still remain persuasive [4/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

We examined how political advertisements, when aligned with an individual's personality traits can be more persuasive than non-tailored messages [3/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

Our study raises concerns about the potential for misusing generative AI like ChatGPT to create personalized political advertisements based on individual psychological profiles [2/8]

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

New paper alert! Now on PNAS Nexus: The persuasive effects of political microtargeting in the age of generative AI w/ @lewan.bsky.social and Matthew Edwards doi.org/10.1093/pnas... [1/8]

doi.org

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Ross Dahlke @rossdahlke.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

What is honesty and truth? New work from Lasser, Aroyehun, Carrella, @almogsi.bsky.social Garcia & Lewandowsky finds that the dissemination of misinformation by US politicians (Republicans) is connected to an alternative understanding of honesty and truth nature.com/articles/s41...

Fig 1. The figure depicts the distribution of keywords on a textual scatterplot

Fig 2. Belief-speaking and fact-speaking similarity in tweets by members of the US Congress for the period 2011-2022 shown separately for members of each party

Fig 3. Relation of information quality with belief speaking and fact speaking

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · 26/09/2023

pretty sure a good 80% of that amount is due to my recent formatting exchange with an editorial assistant

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