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Jeff Lees

@leesplez.bsky.social
2K followers 2K following 78 posts

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior @ University of Groningen | psychology of leadership, sustainability, ideology, and misperceptions | #rstats | #openscience | he/they | 🇺🇸→🇳🇱 | www.jeffreymlees.com

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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
As someone who studies racism and hatred, it's pretty f*cking appalling to see mainstream media wholly legitimizing rank bigotry against Muslims.
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
A European colleague came to the US recently for an academic meeting On arrival at JFK, she was whisked off by immigration officers into a windowless office, which had a giant picture of Trump, & relentlessly & aggressively questioned for hours They let her go—but she ain’t coming back to the US
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
We (men) are strongly socialized to (1) have "strong values" that define us, and (2) never let those values interfere in our interpersonal male relationships, especially if it would mean holding male acquaintances accountable for their behavior, double-especially for men's behavior toward women.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
The new McCarthyism continues to come for university programs. www.npr.org/2026/01/30/n...
npr.org
Texas A&M University cancels programs in women's and gender studies
The university said it had also modified hundreds of courses and cancelled six in efforts to eliminate teaching related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
The most impressive thing about Bari is her ability to violate ethical principles while indignantly claiming to defend them.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Glad to see my alma mater capitulating to the Trump administration's McCarthyist campaign of censorship. Condemning genocide will get you stripped of your leadership positions at Harvard.
thecrimson.com
Harvard Dismisses Director of FXB Center for Health and Human Rights | News | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard forced out the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights — another shakeup at a center whose programming on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been a flashpoint...
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Universities will keep sexual predators on the faculty because their "hands are tied by tenure." Turns out protesting genocide is all it takes to loosen those unshakable chains.
theguardian.com
Tenured US professor fired over pro-Palestinian protests contests dismissal
Sang Hea Kil is first tenured faculty member fired from a public university in connection to the protests
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Shame on @npr.org for regurgitating anti-vax propaganda. The 10 kids mentioned in the headline? That's a lie, something Trump's FDA asserted with zero evidence. How long until this article mentions that? Paragraph Ten. And this article *never* mentions this policy will likely lead to dead children.
npr.org
FDA to raise hurdles for vaccines, faulting COVID shots for 10 kids' deaths
Food and Drug Administration officials say they will ratchet up requirements for vaccine studies, citing concerns about COVID shots for kids. But public health experts question the agency's analysis.
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Patrick Warren @pwarren.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Out today! An update to our award-winning Spot-The-Troll Quiz. New trolls, new real users, new tricks, new lessons! Check it out: spotthetroll.org
spotthetroll.org
Internet Troll and Disinformation Quiz
Learn the signs of online disinformation and internet trolls. The Spot the Troll quiz asks you to examine real social media profiles and posts and decide whether they are legitimate.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
This was so fun!
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Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · 10/10/2025
Lost Science is a new NYT series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding. You can send your story to the Times here www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...
apnews.com
Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.
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D. Hicks @danhicks.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Finally officially published! "Race science in mainstream psychology, 1960–2010" with @rhacodactylus.bsky.social (who needs a job btw) direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... 🧵 #histsci #sts #philsci #metascience
direct.mit.edu
Race science in mainstream psychology, 1960–2010
Abstract. Anthropologists and human geneticists have long rejected efforts to purportedly scientifically justify racial inequality and colonialism. But race science has persisted, at least on the marg...
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Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
“research suggests that this approach to vaccines is entirely logical in a culture that insists that health is the result of hard work and informed consumer decisions and too often sees illness as a personal failure.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | What 20 Years of Listening to Vaccine-Hesitant Parents Has Taught Me
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
I'm sure that if we scientists remain "apolitical" that this campaign of scientific censorship will stop, right...right?
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
I'm generally averse to left-wing hypocracy-porn But in this instance, I don't think the takeaway is that radical centrists are hypocrites on free speech The lesson is instead that the moral panic over "left-wing cancel culture" is and always was a reactionary propaganda campaign 1/2
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
What is happening at public universities in Red states will not stop at public universities in Red states. The Authoritarians want speech codes, blacklists, and loyalty oaths for all in academia.
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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
So, a university president fired a professor because they taught a course that discussed there being more than two genders, and now the university president is being fired for not having fired the professor quickly enough, is where we're at. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...
nytimes.com
Texas A&M President to Step Down After Controversy Over ‘Gender Ideology’
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Living in Europe, the one thing I find difficult to convey to Europeans is just how completely incompetent and feckless the Democratic Party Leadership is at doing politics.
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Fernando Blanco 🦋 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @fernandoblancopsy.com · 16/09/2025
We are offering a 2-year postdoctoral position at CIMCyC (Granada, Spain) to work on the psychology of dis(mis)information. Apply before 26th September. Nice city, great environment ☺️ Please share! 🔃 cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati... #socialpsychology #cogpsyc #PsychSciSky #PsychJob #PhDJob
cimcyc.ugr.es
Job Offer: Postdoctoral Researcher in Disinformation
As part of the strategic plan linked to the María de Maeztu Seal of Excellence award, the CIMCYC is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher with experience in the field of the psychology of disinformatio...
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
*nodding and pointing upward sagely*
Individual instances like that have relatively small impacts, but when so much of the media does it, in so many ways, for years on end, i creates a process of normalization. The US right gets more fascist, mainstream figures pretend they didn't, presenting a fictional version that liberal elites find reasonable. That creates a new baseline, which fascists use to go further, which mainstream media pretends didn't happen, and eventually it's like the metaphor of a frog in slowly heating water, failing to notice that things have fundamentally changed until it's already boiling.In this specific instance, the impact is giving people who didn't know of Charlie Kirk the false impression he was a supporter of free speech gunned down because others can't tolerate open dialogue. That in turn provides some cover for crackaowns on free speech in Kirk's
name.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
Maybe it's time the media put to rest the decade-long moral panic over "left-wing cancel culture" and start seeing f*cking reality for what it is?
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Derek Bruff @derekbruff.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
From the @aaup.org: www.aaup.org/news/academi...
The AAUP notes with great alarm the rash of recent administrative actions to discipline faculty, staff, and student speech in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. We write to remind leaders of colleges and universities of their fundamental duty to protect academic freedom and the absolute necessity to ensure that the freedom to discuss topics of public import without constraint is not curtailed under political pressure. As established in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, faculty are entitled to hearings under longstanding principles before they may be subject to discipline. At a moment when higher education is threatened by forces that seek to destroy it and its role in a democratic society, the anticipatory obedience shown by this rush to judgment must be avoided.
Publication date
September 15, 2025
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Is this the "left-wing cancel culture" we've heard so much about?
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
It's *almost* as if Kennedy personally profits from people who don't trust real medicine and science and instead get sucked into the scam-filled world of "alternative" medicines The man is a professional con-artists in an administration run by professional con-artists
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Looking for help from #psychology and #survey folks who study #politics and use Prolific to collect data What is the maximum for # of GOP participants one can plausibly get? According to the prescreen there's 10-12k GOP/leaners, but of course what's realistic for uptake is much lower. Thank you!
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:
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Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte @turnbulldugarte.com · 05/09/2025
Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
More state-backed speech codes from the "DEI is destroying academic freedom" crowd 🖕
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Flavio Azevedo @flavioazevedo.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Extremely proud of this very thorough and informative Handbook for conducting both Replications and Reproductions! What an amazing team of experts and so much insight into one place! Go @forrt.bsky.social , go 🚀
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 31/08/2025
Umberto Eco's 8th property of fascism: the enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak.
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Klaus Pforr @klauspforr.eurosky.social · 15/08/2025
Paper on the problems of using LLMs as replacements for human participants journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Six Fallacies in Substituting Large Language Models for Human Participants - Zhicheng Lin, 2025
Can artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, such as large language models (LLMs), replace human participants in behavioral and psychological research? Here, I cri...
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Maybe some in the "hard" sciences should read a little more "soft" science and history to learn that trying to appease authoritarians will not save them Also, f*ck you if you'd so easily throw your colleagues to the wolves just to protect your little academic fiefdom 🖕🖕🖕 #solidarity
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Will Marble @wpmarble.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...
Screenshot of title page.

"The Long-Run Effects of Colleges on Civic and Political Life" by Michael J. Andrews, William Marble, and Lauren Russell.

Abstract: Social theorists and education advocates have long argued for the civic benefits of education. As large, durable institutions, universities are especially likely to affect the civic life of their communities. We investigate how the establishment of a university alters the civic and political trajectory of the surrounding area. For identification, we leverage historical site selection processes in which multiple locations were considered for new colleges. We bring together data on social capital, political preferences, and elections to assess the long-run impacts of college establishment. Communities with colleges exhibit higher levels of civic engagement and greater social trust today, relative to “runner-up” locations without colleges. These counties are also more politically liberal — a gap that has grown substantially since 2000. Our findings suggest understanding universities as place-based policies that shape the long-run civic and political development of their communities. They also shed light on current political battles over higher education policy.
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Karl Jacoby @karl-jacoby.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
I said what I said: "Professors are considering leaving Columbia because of the settlement, said Jacoby and Dixon-Román. 'It’s very demoralizing to teach in a university that’s, from my perspective, acceding to authoritarian demands,' Jacoby said." www.chronicle.com/article/colu...
chronicle.com
Columbia Struck a Deal to Save Research Funding. How Do Its Researchers Feel About That?
Faculty and others expressed a mixture of relief and frustration over the deal, under which the university will pay over $200 million to have most of its research funding restored.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
A friendly reminder that the leadership of Columbia University are traitors to everything that academic freedom stands for
gothamist.com
Columbia disciplines 70 students for protest as school pleads with Trump for funding
The disciplinary actions come as the university tries to access about $1 billion in frozen grants, officials said.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Is this the "left-wing cancel culture" we keep hearing about on college campuses? www.theguardian.com/education/20...
theguardian.com
Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication
As Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the ‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Waking up on a Monday morning to a minor revision
media.tenor.com
a man is dancing in a living room while wearing a red sweater .
ALT: a man is dancing in a living room while wearing a red sweater .
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
Yo! I'm looking for examples of good political science articles that theoretically or engage with space/context/place. Can you help me out?
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John Cook @johnfocook.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Spoke to @katieyoder.bsky.social about the very disturbing development of the Trump administration disappearing climate reports and data, taking climate denial to an unseen level grist.org/language/tru...
grist.org
Why the federal government is making climate data disappear
Under Trump, climate denial has given way to something even more dangerous: climate erasure.
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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
We're hiring! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30219 The Cornell Department of Communication is hiring an Assistant Professor in Science, Environment, and Risk Communication! Applications received by September 15, 2025, will be given full consideration.
academicjobsonline.org
Cornell University, Department of Communication
Job #AJO30219, WDR-00053939 Assistant Professor in Science, Environment, and Risk Communication, Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US
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Environmental Psychology Groningen @epgroningen.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
In their new paper, our colleague Isabel Pacheco (+Ellen van der Werff+Linda Steg) introduces the Systemic Change through Citizen Action (SCCA) framework: actions individuals can take to promote systemic changes towards more #sustainability & #circularity: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵:
sciencedirect.com
Circular citizenship behaviors: How individuals can promote systemic change toward a circular economy
Sustainability challenges, such as transitioning to a circular economy, require people to engage in sustainable behaviors. Yet, current systems often …
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Amy Diehl, Ph.D. @amydiehl.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...
forbes.com
Being Too Helpful At Work Can Hurt Your Career—Here’s How To Say No
Women are more likely to take on behind-the-scenes duties at work—extra tasks like onboarding or event planning—and it's hurting their careers. Here's how to say no.
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
There's a growing body of research on "generalized prejudice," given the high correlation between prejudices And what unifies these people? A belief in social hierarchy. If one likes social hierarchy, they tend to dislike all groups low on the hierarchy (women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, etc.)
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Help me find a paper! I think it came out 5-10 years ago, and it showed that academic psychologists (or maybe social scientists) had trouble interpreting complex statistical interactions, and couldn't explain a 4-way interaction. 1/2 #openscience #psychology #metascience #statistics
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W. Carson Byrd @wcbyrdphd.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
In the fallout of James Ryan resigning from UVA, @sivav.bsky.social provides a clear argument of what higher ed is facing & why capitulation will not save you. newrepublic.com/article/1973...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
The Trump administration just established a precedent that they can pick and choose who leads higher Ed institutions. An authoritarian government deepens its reach into higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u...
nytimes.com
University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration
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Jeff Lees @leesplez.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
#SIPS2025 was a phenomenal conference! It sets the bar for great people and a worthwhile, productive time.
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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 19/06/2025
I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12
sks.to
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to ...
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