iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by xavier roberts-gaal

Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date): academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868 An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

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František Bartoš @fbartos.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

We just preprinted a huge meta-meta-analysis examining the effects of exercise on cognition, memory, and executive function In short - 2239 effect sizes - extreme between-study heterogeneity - extensive publication bias - some subgroup/exercise-specific effects More below (doi.org/10.31234/osf...)

doi.org

OSF

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

How and when and why do children use loopholes? Our research on this hits the Big Time*: (* Big time = SciShow, with Hank Greene) youtu.be/f7FhKywXRGk?... (original paper in question: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

youtu.be

Lying and 6 Other Things Babies Learn Early

YouTube video by SciShow

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

thanks for mentioning our preprint! we're currently in revision; keen to hear any devastating critiques so the paper is as useful as it can be :)

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

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Scripps Research @scripps.edu · 10/10/2025

The NIH has awarded a $14.2M Director’s Transformative Research Award to a team led by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist @ardemp.bskyverified.social, Prof. @liye-tsri.bsky.social and Assoc. Prof. @xinjin.bsky.social to map interoception and build the first atlas of this hidden sixth sense.

scripps.edu

Scripps Research-led team receives $14.2M NIH award to map the body’s “hidden sixth sense”

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Steve Rathje @steverathje.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions. Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased! osf.io/preprints/ps... Thread 🧵

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

i LOVED getting over it! will check out :)

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Eric Mandelbaum @ericman.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

My friends @foddy.net and @gcuzzillo.bsky.social's game @babystepsgame.bsky.social came out today and it looks amazing. @foddy.net is an artist and philosopher in the truest sense of the words, who just happens to be using video games as his medium at the moment: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/a...

nytimes.com

When You Fall on Your Face, a Philosophical Designer Succeeds

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

love this really elegant paper spearheaded by Linas! one of the clearest instances of resource-rational social cognition i've seen worth a read!

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Haneul Jang @haneuljang.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

academic.oup.com

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society

Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

out now in Open Mind: "People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior" by Bigelow & me Paper: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... OSF: osf.io/yzbrq/?view_...

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Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.com

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025

Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

good timing! Also check out this paper by Jonathan de Quidt, Johannes Haushofer, and Christopher Roth deriving bounds for demand effects in the dictator game (here, we directly replicate their "weak" demand cue in a different sample) www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

yes, thanks for your interest! the preprint is here: osf.io/preprints/ps... (i never know whether the algorithm penalizes threads with a link in the first post)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

haha, well, at least 4% of people say shape-shifting lizards control the govt. Also, some great work by Seetahul and Greitemeyer suggests that participants are more likely to react when they think studies will counteract their interests (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....)

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

One thing we can't rule out: a mixture of demand compliance AND reactance in the same person (i.e., feeling pulled in both directions). But I'm not sure what kind of experiment could test this easily. A straightforward within-subjects design could be subject to concerns of "meta demand."

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

We also don't see a very sharp difference in the standard deviations in both demand conditions (which we'd expect if we have reacters and compliers). Distributions look pretty similar.

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Good point! We address this in study 3 (p. 27), where we fit a mixture model testing for latent classes of compliers and reacters. No latent class exhibited significant evidence of a shift from zero, either in the compliance or reactance direction. The subsample which trended closest was <5% of Ps

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Reposted by xavier roberts-gaal

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

No Evidence of Experimenter Demand Effects in Three Online Psychology Experiments: osf.io/g6xhf

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Thrilled to work with Lucas Woodley, @rcalcott.bsky.social, & @fierycushman.bsky.social on this project! (Also, glad that many of our causal estimates seem to be unbiased by demand.) Lots more in the paper if you’re interested: osf.io/g6xhf_v1

osf.io

OSF

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

In short: do you need to worry about experimenter demand ruining *your* online study? Based on our evidence, probably not. That's good news for the field! As we argue, demand effects appear, at least in their simplest form, to be more phantom than menace (7/8)

meme about demand effects. Darth Maul from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is igniting his lightsaber in the Naboo palace. The top panel shows Maul igniting the first beam of his lightsaber, with the phrase (from a reviewer, in Comic Sans) "I'm worried these results may be due to demand." The bottom panel shows Maul igniting the second beam of his lightsaber (in dramatic fashion), with the text in large bold font "DEMAND EFFECTS DO NOT EXIST." (Note that we only claim demand effects in online experiments using standard paradigms are weak and/or elusive, and therefore unlikely to bias results. It is a meme :))

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Then we measured participants' dictator game behavior, moral vignette judgments, and change in ingroup attitudes after an intervention (we used an inert subliminal priming intervention for measurement purposes). Control and demand conditions were statistically indistinguishable! (6/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

To answer this, we used obvious ("We hypothesize...") and subtle demand manipulations ("These images are designed to make you feel more warmth toward the average [conservative/liberal]") In each case we verified participants correctly understood study hypotheses. (5/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

...and demand effects are most often observed with small student samples or very heavy-handed cues ("You will help us if you...") But modern psychology experiments use experienced online samples and standardized paradigms. Is demand a realistic concern in this setting? (4/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Some background: meta-analysis (@nicholascoles.bsky.social, Morgan Wyatt, & Michael C. Frank) and prior large-scale studies using economic games (@jondequidt.bsky.social, @johanneshaushofer.com, & Christopher Roth) find small though inconsistent demand effects... (3/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

In three preregistered studies (N=2,254), we revealed the study’s hypothesis. Participants’ beliefs changed but their behavior didn’t. In other words, in a dictator game, a moral vignette, and an attitudes intervention, we created experimenter demand but it had no effect! (2/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

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Mark Shuquan Chen @markschen.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

My website is official 🙌 Excited to share that I am interested in reviewing applications for Harvard’s Clinical Science PhD program this fall as I look for the first student to join my lab! I appreciate it if you can share with your network :) psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mark-...

psychology.fas.harvard.edu

Mark Chen | Department of Psychology

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Alex Wiegmann @alexwiegmann.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

🔥Exciting news in experimental philosophy🔥 Very happy to announce that there will be soon a new journal named “Experimental Philosophy”. It will be open access, free of charge for authors and follow all Open Science principles. Editors and Editorial Board below. More information coming soon...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

grateful for the chance to collaborate with the inimitable arthur le pargneux and @fierycushman.bsky.social check out our preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

our findings are consistent with recent work in contractualist moral cognition by @sydneylevine.bsky.social @jbaptistandre.bsky.social @jaredlcm.bsky.social and others moral judgments often track what we believe negotiating agents would agree to!

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

by contrast, in a donation context where bargaining does not apply, moral intuitions completely reverse! people instead think it's most fair to redistribute money to the party who can earn less on their own -- or to split the money equally

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

people say how money should be split between two parties who differ only in what they can earn on their own when the parties are negotiating, people think it's most fair for the party with a better outside option to take a larger share as a function of their bargaining power

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

should we treat people equally? give more to the needy? sometimes, people think it's fair for those who start out already advantaged to get more -- think bonuses, salary negotiations, and so on in two experiments, we show how the logic of bargaining can govern these moral intuitions!

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

the functional form of moral judgment is (sometimes) the nash bargaining solution new preprint👇

figure 2 from our preprint, reporting the results from two experiments

we measure moral judgments about dividing money between two parties and manipulate the degree of asymmetry in the outside options each party has

we find that moral judgments track predictions from rational bargaining models like the nash bargaining solution and the kalai-smorodinsky solution in a negotiation context

by contrast, in a donation context, moral intuitions completely reverse, instead tracking redistributive and egalitarian principles

preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3uqks_v1

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simine vazire @simine.com · 18/01/2024

Part 2 of the Freakonomics series on fraud in academic research is out. With the same people as part 1 (@briannosek.bsky.social @joesimmons.bsky.social @urisohn.bsky.social Leif Nelson, me, and Max Bazerman), plus Ivan Oransky. freakonomics.com/podcast/can-...

freakonomics.com

Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? - Freakonomics

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Stellbound: Stellraiser II @antlervel.vet · 20/12/2023

Inspiring words from this NASA official

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 14/12/2023

Timo Flesch’s PhD thesis was on representation learning in rich vs lazy regimes. He used a macaque context dependent DM dataset from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles... which looks like it contains 80 recording sessions (Timo’s paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) Maybe helpful?

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Context-dependent computation by recurrent dynamics in prefrontal cortex

Prefrontal cortex is thought to play a fundamental role in flexible, context-dependent behavior, but the exact nature of the computations underlying this role remains largely mysterious. In particular...

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Andrew Lampinen @lampinen.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

How far can we trust representation analyses or mechanistic interpretations? Our new work, led by Dan Friedman shows that analyses based on simplifying the model or its representations can be misleading about how the model will behave out of distribution! arxiv.org/abs/2312.03656

Principle components analysis of network representations, showing organized clusters colored by properties of the data

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Steve Haroz @steveharoz.com · 28/11/2023

Great open access textbook on experiment design! (h/t @mcxfrank.bsky.social) experimentology.io

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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 25/11/2023

Scientists paid large publishers over $1 billion in four years to have their studies published with open access well done, folks english.elpais.com/science-tech...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23/11/2023

can confirm (though not a meat based expert) — is there a wider hungarian psych x food pics bluesky nexus? missing nokedli & paprikas & lángos

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Reposted by xavier roberts-gaal

Edouard Machery @edouardmachery.bsky.social · 21/11/2023

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPP 2024 The Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) invites submissions of papers to be presented at its 50th Annual Meeting to be held June 19-June 22, 2024 at Purdue University (local organizer: Corey Maley).

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Iyad Rahwan | إياد رهوان @iyadrahwan.bsky.social · 20/11/2023

Our perspective paper "Machine Culture" is out in Nature Human Behavior. Free access version: rdcu.be/drzoS

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 20/11/2023

this is a bloody great name for a climate report www.unep.org/resources/em...

Broken Record
Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again)
UN
environment programme
。

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