iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 20/09/2026

The new approach treats ratings as subjective probabilities. For mutually exclusive explanations, the total probability cannot exceed 100%. Assigning 90% to each is an “overspend” of belief. 🍕 (Think: more than one pizza from one pizza.) 3/9

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 10/09/2026

Coming up in Plenary 1 at 10:15.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 09/09/2026

If you are in Luxembourg at DGP, this panel starts on a few minutes in Plenary 1.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 20/07/2026

Our fixes span individual tools (inoculation, AI-assisted debunking, literacy) to systemic reforms (algorithmic transparency, monetization reform, platform interoperability). No single lever works alone — see our table of interventions. 8/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 15/06/2026

Very much looking forward to contributing to this event in Bristol on 2 July: www.tickettailor.com...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 07/06/2026

There's a major responsibility gap. Those MOST responsible (AI developers, governments, regulators) are NOT the most vulnerable. Users & the public bear the most risk but have the least leverage to act. See figure: 6/8

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 07/06/2026

Info, finance & national security are most vulnerable sectors. Experts reached consensus: these are 'extremely vulnerable' across most risks. See figure: 5/8

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 07/06/2026

Experts rated 24 AI risks. Under business-as-usual, 18 of 24 had >10% chance of catastrophic outcomes (>1M deaths or >$100B loss) in the next 5 years (2025–2030). I guess that's an Oops -- see figure. 2/8

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 28/05/2026

Looking forward to #APS26BCN in the wonderful city of Barcelona.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 13/05/2026

We have the pleasure to add an Arabic translation to our line-up: zenodo.org/records/2... . Thanks to Gohary Mohamed ElGohary for doing this. 2/6

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 13/05/2026

Very pleased to announce another translation of our Anti-Autocracy Handbook: wiki.savescience.eu/.... 1/6

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 09/05/2026

Very pleased to share a new policy brief by CAISA: Governing AI-generated content: Labelling for transparency when AI is the norm. This was a genuine privilege to be part of the team of 9 leading European scholars caisa.dk/forskning/t... 🧵 1/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 08/05/2026

How disappointing for Labour. They tried everything, including handcuffing children, treating immigrants like unhumans, and somehow this didn't stop the far right. Labour will have to try harder. There must be something they can do surely? Deportations to Rwanda? Masked goons on the streets?

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 25/04/2026

Very good, now we know on which issue Labour will next surrender.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 12/04/2026

please, please make it make sense. edition.cnn.com/2026/04/12/w...

Trump says US will blockade Strait of Hormuz after Iran talks end without a deal
In marathon meetings this weekend, sources say the two sides were deadlocked over Tehran's nuclear program and control of the strait.

Updated 11:03 AM EDT, Sun April 12, 2026

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 11/04/2026

UCS just released a very nice and concise guide for how to stay safe in the public eye -- for scholars and researchers, but also for anyone else concerned about safety during autocratization: www.ucs.org/sites/de...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 09/04/2026

🧵 New report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇 1/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/04/2026

Personality-targeted ads were significantly more persuasive than non-targeted ads in all three studies. The popup warning had no practically meaningful effect. Equivalence tests confirmed the popup's impact was statistically indistinguishable from zero. 10/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/04/2026

A source inoculation ("AI can fabricate info") did reduce general trust in AI — but still didn't stop people relying on the specific misleading article. Only inoculation + debunking combined eliminated the misinformation effect entirely. One tool is not enough. 8/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/04/2026

First surprise: labelling an article as written by ChatGPT vs. a human made no difference. People were equally misled. The standard ChatGPT disclaimer ("I can make mistakes") also had zero effect on how much people relied on the misinformation. Zero. 7/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/04/2026

Even with a specific warning — "this video has been flagged as a deepfake" — participants still judged the person significantly more guilty than controls. Critically: even people who said they believed the warning were still influenced by the content. 4/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/04/2026

Another event I am looking forward to in Western Australia on the 22nd of April: events.humanitix.com... Hosted by Ullrich Ecker and colleagues at UWA.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 23/03/2026

Great piece by Nesrine Malik that captures the particular moral depravity of this war and its instigators: www.theguardian.com/... This is the takehome message:

It is enormously difficult amid such swirling forces to hold on to a sense of empathy, to follow a moral compass, to understand that thousands of innocent people are dying, their homes destroyed, their nations destabilised for a generation. And that we have a duty towards them that can be exercised through pressure on the architects of their suffering. This is the challenge of this war and, in fact, our entire age: to retain and insist on humanity in the face of those political leaders who benefit from effacing it, and those owners of platforms who profit from it.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 20/03/2026

Looking forward to the Autocracy workshop at APS in Barcelona in May: www.psychologicalsci... What steps can researchers and scholars take to protect their work from autocratic interference? Are there ways to fight back against democratic backsliding? What risks can we take? 1/4

Safeguarding Scholarship in Emerging Autocracies
14:00 – 18:00 (2:00 – 6:00 PM)
Presenters:

Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Vera Kempe, Abertay University, Dundee, United Kingdom
Christina Pagel, University College London, United Kingdom
Drawing on the Anti-Autocracy Handbook ( https://sks.to/autocracy), this workshop helps scholars recognise the “3 Ps” of autocratization: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Participants will assess personal risk to choose safe activities to counter autocratization. Through active listening and collaborative exercises, attendees will build collective strategies to defend academic freedom and democratic accountability.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 20/02/2026

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"? www.techdirt.com/202...

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature.

This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 09/02/2026

We can move the needle on vaccine uptake using empathy and affirmation followed by refutation of misconceptions. (The MI, the motivational interview works equally well for uptake but the ERI has the edge in self-reports, shown below): 4/7

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 09/02/2026

.. and we showed how effective the technique is in the field in Romania. The article is here: www.nature.com/artic... . Headline result shown below: 3/7

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/02/2026

Precisely as Dorothy Bishop and I anticipated -- with one important difference: we talked about the risk of data being open for subsequent abuse, whereas in this case the data were not open but obtained by, umm, indirect means: 7/10

Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/02/2026

Notwithstanding promises of confidentiality, the genetic data of 20,000 children were abused for racist pseudoscience: 6/10

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/02/2026

Fast forward 10 years and this example is no longer hypothetical: www.nytimes.com/2026.... 5/10

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/02/2026

Here are some of the slides from that talk which make this point with an hypothetical example: 4/10

Ms. Jones consents to participate in an experiment that observes the effect of WM training on IQ
Suppose Ms. Jones was black
did she realize what she consented to?
would she have given consent if she knew this could happen?
given what happened, would she ever consent again?
note that anonymity is not the issue

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 01/02/2026

🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a 1/10

Don’t let transparency
damage science
Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop explain how the research
community should protect its members from harassment, while
encouraging the openness that has become essential to science.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 06/01/2026

Even in 2026, this should still be shocking. It is. www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as “insurrectionists” and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump—despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government. In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power. This gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 04/01/2026

And sure enough, the company shows up on the Israeli register: www.kycisrael.com/co... 7/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 04/01/2026

Too bad, maybe the "journal" has more information about itself? Well, yes, it helpfully identifies the publisher as "The IJ Group, Ltd.", which does have its own homepage: www.theijgroup.com/ 6/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 04/01/2026

What about Scopus? Nah, drew a blank there as well: 5/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 04/01/2026

It's a little hard to tell because Scimago does not seem to know about it: 4/10

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 23/11/2025

Here it is, the topsy-turvy upside-down world of what used to be a reliable scientific institution: www.cdc.gov/vaccine-... 4/6

Autism and Vaccines
Questions and Concerns | Page 2 of 9 | All pages
For Everyone
Nov. 19, 2025
Key points
The claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.
HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 23/11/2025

The paper started out with "Imagine a world in which it is not medical knowledge but a free-for-all opinion market on Twitter that determines whether a newly emergent strain of avian flu is really contagious to humans. This dystopian future is still just that—a possible future." That was 2017 2/6

General Audience SummaryImagine a world that considers knowledge to be “elitist.” Imagine a world in which it is not medical knowledgebut a free-for-all opinion market on Twitter that determines whether a newly emergent strain of avian flu isreally contagious to humans. This dystopian future is still just that—a possible future. However, there are signsthat public discourse is evolving in this direction: terms such as “post-truth” and “fake news,” largely unknown until 2016, have exploded into media and public discourse. This article explores the growing abundance of misinformation in the public sphere, how it influences people, and how to counter it. We show how misinformation can have an adverse impact on society, for example by predisposing parents to make disadvantageous medical decisions for their children. We argue that for countermeasures to be effective, they must be informed by the larger political, technological, and societal context.

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 23/11/2025

A little retrospective can be helpful at times to work out what has been happening and what was knowable. Let's travel back in time to 2017 (~8 years ago) when I was lead author on a paper about the post-truth world. doi.org/10.1016/j.ja... 1/6

Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the“Post-Truth” EraStephan Lewandowsky∗University of Bristol, United KingdomUniversity of Western Australia, AustraliaUllrich K.H. EckerUniversity of Western Australia, AustraliaJohn CookGeorge Mason University, United StatesThe terms “post-truth” and “fake news” have become increasingly prevalent in public discourse over the last year.This article explores the growing abundance of misinformation, how it influences people, and how to counter it.We examine the ways in which misinformation can have an adverse impact on society. We summarize how peoplerespond to corrections of misinformation, and what kinds of corrections are most effective. We argue that to beeffective, scientific research into misinformation must be considered within a larger political, technological, andsocietal context. The post-truth world emerged as a result of societal mega-trends such as a decline in social capital,growing economic inequality, increased polariza

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 21/11/2025

.. the Anti-Autocracy Summit on Thursday 4 December | 14:00–18:00 UK (15:00–19:00 CET, 9 am–1 pm EST, 6 am–10 am PST). Details here: www.scibeh.org/event.... 2/6

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 21/11/2025

As autocratization proceeds in the U.S. and elsewhere, it's time for a stock-take. Where are we, where are we going? What works? What might work better? Nearly 6 months after we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook sks.to/autocracy the SciBeh team is hosting its next big event .... 1/6

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 17/11/2025

We are also pleased to announce our "anti-autocracy summit" planned for 4 December. Details here: www.scibeh.org/event... 3/4

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 17/11/2025

We are delighted to announce the first two translations of the Handbook, into German and Italian. They are available through our portal: sks.to/autocracy 2/4

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 17/11/2025

In light of the assault on American science by its own government that launched in January this year, we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook in June to provide some guidance to scholars about how to respond to an emerging autocracy. The handbook is available at: sks.to/autocracy. 1/n 1/4

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 16/11/2025

Turns out that information abundance *per se*; that is, irrespective of information quality, has adverse cognitive consequences. Under information overload, attentional selection processes favor information that is belief-consistent, negative, social, and predictive. 2/n

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