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Hugo Mercier

@hugoreasoning.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.2K following 136 posts

Evolutionary and cognitive psychologist. Author, Not Born Yesterday (tinyurl.com/yyh929ns), The Enigma of Reason (tinyurl.com/6hbpn84).

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Reposted by Hugo Mercier
Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 9h
Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 14h
Our paper 'Carving Stories at Their Natural Joints' is out in Psychological Review (@apajournals.bsky.social). It means a lot to me, especially because I got to collaborate with many researchers from different disciplines whose work I truly admire.
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Phil Klinkner @pklinkne.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I really love this chart. I'm guess that the correlation here (.85) is about as big as you would find for any other variable. Also, a less serious scholar than @tesler.bsky.social (namely me) would have made a crude Freudian reference to the slope of the line.
Chart shows a close positive relationship between Trump's 2024 vote and Google searches for testosterone boosters.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Seems like it should be part of the "are phones ruining the kids" debate that every marker of teen mental health has improved since 2021 www.cdc.gov/yrbs/youth-h...
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Jérémie Beucler @jeremiebeucler.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
1/15 What do we actually do when we deliberate, and how does it change over time? New preprint with @wimdeneys.bsky.social : "Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning". 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf... (yes, I like flashy titles 💅) A 🧵👇
Title page showing:

Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning
Jérémie Beucler a,* and Wim De Neys a

a LaPsyDÉ, CNRS, Université Paris Cité, F-75005 Paris, France

Abstract

When an intuitive answer is uncertain, people are thought to engage in further reasoning. But what people actually do during this additional thinking, how it unfolds over time, and why it sometimes leads to better answers remain unclear. We scored think-aloud protocols with large language models to track, moment by moment, four possible functions of deliberation (generating candidate responses, justifying them, controlling intuitive responses, and regulating cognitive effort), together with expressed confidence. Deliberation showed a clear temporal organization: generation dominated early, whereas justification, control, and regulation became increasingly prominent as reasoning progressed. Correct responses involved more justification, control, and regulation than biased responses, and these evolving dynamics predicted accuracy for out-of-sample participants and items. Confidence and deliberation also showed reciprocal lagged associations: lower confidence predicted further generation, justification, and control, whereas regulation predicted subsequent increases in confidence. Deliberation, then, appears to involve not a single act of "thinking harder," but an evolving interplay of reasoning processes whose organization is linked to whether reasoning succeeds.

Keywords: deliberation; reasoning dynamics; verbal protocols; large language models; metacognition; dual-process theories
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Joel T. Patterson @joelpatt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
wow. It's real. www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adve...
outsideonline.com
What Killed the Bear Lady?
For 28 years, Kay Grayson lived side-by-side with wild black bears in North Carolina's swampy coastal forests, hand-feeding them, defending them against poachers, and letting them in her home. When sh...
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Esther Boissin @boissinesther.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Happy to share a new preprint with @tomcostello.bsky.social, @dgrand.bsky.social and @gordpennycook.bsky.social 🧵 "What beliefs are most debunkable?" osf.io/preprints/ps... We investigate the characteristics of the beliefs that are (or are not) influenced by counterevidence in 3,341 AI dialogues.
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Sacha Altay @sachaltay.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
With Claude I did a systematic literature review of misinformation prevalence, exposure, and concentration. There is a companion website that allows you to play with the data and signal me if an estimate is wrong or missing: altay-research.github.io/misinfo-prev...
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Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla... It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline
as.cornell.edu
Klarman Fellowships
The Klarman Fellowships in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kin...
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Aurelien Mondon @aurelmondon.com · 17/09/2026
It was confirmed yesterday that the centre left coalition won the election in Sweden As predicted, with the far right performing poorly, coverage has almost entirely vanished from international media
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Thomas Talhelm @thomastalhelm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
🚨 It's published! 🚨 This is the big one. 100 cultures, 12,000 people, 108 researchers. Why people (and our most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.nature.com
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C. Kirabo Jackson @kirabojackson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
If spending more on schools raises the earnings of the children who benefit, does it eventually make the whole economy richer? My new NBER paper examines this using school-finance reforms. 🧵 www.nber.org/papers/w35755
nber.org
The Macroeconomic Returns to School Finance Reforms: Micro-Calibrated Predictions Meet Causal Evidence
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...
Complex and simple stimuli across a variety of domains. Even though these stimuli are complex for different reasons, we suggest the mind unifies them by their complexity. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p9xe3_v1
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Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Hey folks, I'll be considering PhD applications for the 2026-27 cycle over here at Duke Psych. To learn more about the lab, check us out at www.mindandculturelab.com and/or read through this short FAQ for prospective students: www.mindandculturelab.com/faq
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
"We would be better off if we could rely on actual social science, rather than the kind of bong-hit P(d00m)ing in much of this week’s media commentary, to understand the upheavals that are happening around us."
programmablemutter.com
How should social science think about AI?
Big structures and large processes are back, baby
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Extremely impressive field experiment by @nmalhotra.bsky.social et al. had few effects on election attitudes among conservatives in TX despite being "exposed to an average of 20 online videos, 18.5 cable TV videos, 23.9 display ads, 3 text messages, and 3 postcards" www.science.org/doi/full/10....
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Lindsey Powell @lindseypowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646
apol-recruit.ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor in High-level Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!
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Ed Hagen @edhagen.net · 08/09/2026
This #rstats package can help you avoid doxxing the participants in your study when you publish your data 🧪 #AcademicSky: sdctools.github.io/sdcMicro/
sdctools.github.io
Statistical Disclosure Control Methods for Anonymization of Data and Risk Estimation
Data from statistical agencies and other institutions are mostly confidential. This package, introduced in Templ, Kowarik and Meindl (2017) <doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i04>, can be used for the generation ...
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The illusory truth of repeated factual statements does not generalize to social political opinions, research by Riesthuis & Wood suggests—fluency-based processes appear not to influence truth judgments for subjective or evaluative content: buff.ly/TqJuwHY
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Quentin André @quentinandre.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Hilarious stuff from hypocrite-in-chief Bill Ackman, currently bankrolling Francesca Gino, who has *check notes* sued three brave scholars for telling the truth.
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Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Why we need the social sciences to understand AI www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | We Can’t Know Our A.I. Future if We Don’t Study It
Just as A.I. is poised to change the world, we’re losing our best ways of studying what that change will look like.
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Jonathan Jarry @jonathanjarry.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This should be a bombshell in the world of science communication. Dietram Scheufele and Dominique Brossard are big names, and the allegations here are nauseating and revolting. 🧵 captimes.com/news/educati...
captimes.com
UW-Madison students, records detail investigation of professor
Dietram Scheufele resigned after investigators determined he had sexual relationships with two students and engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct with one.
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Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
📰How should researchers debrief participants after exposing them to misinformation? ➡️ @emmahoes.bsky.social & @sachaltay.bsky.social show that specific debriefings with fact-checks reduce belief in false claims, while general warnings may increase skepticism toward true news doi.org/10.1017/psrm...
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Truth-making institutions producing official interpretations of specific situations through eg divination or ordeals are very similar across cultures. @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & Boyer’s fascinating evolutionary account of their emergence and success: buff.ly/XKxt8wl
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SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Anyone who doesn't find this funny is in the lower right. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/philos... PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com
SMBC 1-panel comic update. A four-quadrant chart is shown with the title "know your branches of philosophy." On the left of the horizontal x axis, there is "careful reasoning." on the right of the x axis, "confusing bullshit." At the top of the y vertical axis there is "stuff that matters," and at the bottom of the y axis can be found "stuff that doesn't matter." A dot is located at the far bottom left, identified as "analytic." Another dot is located at the far top right, identified as "continental."
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Rob Sica @robsica.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
"our mechanisms of epistemic vigilance usually work reasonably well"
transformernews.ai
AI is a worryingly-good persuader. But don’t panic, yet
AI systems are able to persuade people, but turning that ability into meaningful real-world influence may be harder
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Data Colada @datacolada.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
An influential paper by Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) reported two studies with tampered data. Post 1 of 2. datacolada.org/138
datacolada.org
[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…
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Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 29/08/2026
I did not know this: eBay ran field experiments turning off paid search ads on google and there was zero measurable effect on sales. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3...
This begs the question: why do well-known companies spend large amounts of money on what seems to be a rather ineffective marketing channel?
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Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Why do people trust physicists and biologists more than economists or sociologists? In a new paper out in Public Understanding of Science, @hugoreasoning.bsky.social and I argue that it has to do with perceived precision and consensus. doi.org/10.1177/0963...
doi.org
Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted - Jan Pfänder, Hugo Mercier, 2026
Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps st...
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Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦 @sobchuk.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...
Postdoc and PhD positions at MPIAE in Frankfurt
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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
You roll a fair die, hoping to get a 6. If you are successful, did you *intentionally* roll a 6? In a new paper, I explain why people hesitate to call lucky outcomes intentional:🧵 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
For four years, AI has reigned supreme – and lots of news organisations have jumped on the bandwagon/caught on/thought deeply about how they, too, could make use of it. What do they (want to) use it for? Increasingly for content creation. Full post here: open.substack.com/pub/felixsim...
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Julien Lie-Panis @jliep.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵
Screenshot of article title page, "Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules"
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OG Unmitigated Gaul @unmitigatedgaul1.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
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Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.eurosky.social · 20/04/2026
What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/
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Miguel Clavero @chikichanka.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats Just published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyes Led by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro @ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Korinna Lindemann @korinlind.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
📢 Job Ad: I am looking for one doctoral researcher (75%) in my newly funded DFG project on misperceptions and factual information on immigration from 1.10. or soon after! 📌 Location: MZES, University of Mannheim 💢 Application Deadline: 21st of July
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Prof Nichola Raihani @nicholaraihani.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
If you have (or will soon) complete your PhD & would like to join a thriving cultural evolution research group in NEW ZEALAND, drop me a line. UoA offers a handful of funded research fellowships. Applications must be made by a faculty member. Deadline August. Pls share with your students
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Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦 @sobchuk.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!
Job announcement of two positions at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt: postdoc (Macroevolution of European Literature) and PhD student (Computational Literary Studies). Successful candidates will be affiliated with the research group Cultural Evolution of the Arts.
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Tania Lombrozo @tanialombrozo.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
New paper with @sachaltay.bsky.social! A lot of people think AI can only make science worse. We argue agentic AI can actually be a great tool to do it better!
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Republicans experience higher exposure to Democrats than vice versa: the average Republican’s coworkers are 50% Democratic versus 32% Republican for the average Democrat."
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Yet again www.nber.org/papers/w3535...
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Andrea Howard @drandreahoward.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
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 🧵
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Ed Hagen @edhagen.net · 14/06/2026
1. Attempted cancellations of prominent scholars as proxy wars on ideas one doesn't like: the case of Margaret Mead...and a mea culpa 🧪 #AcademicSky
Margaret Mead with Samoan informants
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
✨ 🤖 New pre-print: Is realism dead and do people distrust everything, now that synthetic media is ubiquitous? It’s a bit more complicated.
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