This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
My (very) short piece on how prenatal experience with the mother's voice may rapidly scaffold the development of face perception in newborn infants is now out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com !
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵
Relationships as Microcultures is a new theoretical perspective on what it fundamentally means to be in a close relationship. It’s been a dream working on it with this amazing team of scholars, and I’m so excited that the preprint is ready to share. See Maya’s thread and link to it below!
🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social
We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked
What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective
We call it the digital sphinx
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A circular dendrogram (phenetic tree) of knots, made using the ggtree package in R. A text-readable and high-resolution PDF-version of the tree is available as a supplementary material.
Pleased to see our work published:
The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance
We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies.
Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter.
doi.org/10.1017/S095...
$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025
Who were most affected?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Early career and women researchers
Here's a Society Workshop report about using AI models to learn about a new area of knowledge (in this case the psych of inequality). My favorite part of this was when GEMINI referred to our research as "Kraussian" -- the first time it has been referred to in that way (except in my mind, perhaps).
This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results.
(One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...
Like this. newrepublic.com/article/2068...
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?
In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...
“File drawer 2.0”
“[Supplementary] files offer optimal settings for spinning research outcomes by sorting information between the main document and supplementary files to fit one’s narrative, making information technically available but effectively invisibilised.”
By @paulbertin.bsky.social
Very proud of SoCoSci Labbies Cy Butler and Tom Vanderkam for delivering a great talk and poster presentation! This was Cy's first symposium presentation--and Tom's first poster award for his presentation at the Self & Identity preconference. YAY! 🎉👏 #spsp2026 @spspnews.bsky.social
🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...
🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?
We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...
My first grad student Cy will be giving their first talk at #SPSP2026!! #mentorfeels 🥳 come learn about new research on gender from four fantastic speakers
If you’ll be at @spspnews.bsky.social this week, consider joining the symposium my advisor Peter Mende-Siedlecki & I are co-chairing on Friday (3:30-4:40 pm; @Room E350), featuring talks from @ahbailey.bsky.social, @jowylie.bsky.social, Cy Butler, and me! #SPSP2026
It’s time yall! I’m excited to co-organize a symposium with @freemanjb.bsky.social at @spspnews.bsky.social this week!! Come by Friday morning (8am, room 450B) to see some amazing talks by phenomenal researchers! @xallysie.bsky.social @chujunlin.bsky.social @whatsinertia.bsky.social #SPSP2026
Collaborative groups often outperform single individuals in complex problem solving. A new paper examined how to create the right incentives to promote this kind of collective intelligence.
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
New paper, led by Pia Dietze (newly on bsky! @piadietze.bsky.social) and Riana Brown (@rrrianabrown.bsky.social): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
fun paper with an important message about common method variance:
ABSTRACT We report two studies investigating the relationship between political orientation, national identification and system support among members of discriminated groups within a nation. We used four cross-national datasets comprising several Western countries and more than 13,000 respondents who identified as members of discriminated groups in their respective nations. Study 2 was pre-registered and replicated the methods and analyses of Study 1. Results from both studies indicated that right-leaning individuals from discriminated groups were slightly more likely to be satisfied with the existing system but were equally likely to trust the system compared to their left-leaning counterparts. Furthermore, rightists showed higher levels of national identification. Across both studies, national identification was positively associated with both system satisfaction and trust and showed a significant indirect effect in the relationship between political orientation and system support. These findings suggest that increased system support among discriminated individuals may be partially associated with heightened national identification, which tends to co-occur with right-wing political orientation.
"Right-wing political orientation is positively associated with national identification even among individuals who are disadvantaged by the system."
New work by Luca Caricati: doi.org/10.1002/casp...
Just published in Behavior Research Methods:
The individual-level precision of implicit measures
w/ @ianhussey.mmmdata.io
🧵👇
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Our paper on the ☀️ "summer slide" 🛝 is out now @pnas.org!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Summer slide is a replicable phenomenon across diverse datasets that's more than "forgetting" school material in vacation months, but effects of socioeconomic inequality are ➡️ 7x bigger! ⬅️
#PsychSciSky #DevPsy
🧵👇
Screenshot of title page of an article published in Psychological Bulletin titled "Content Knowledge and Comprehension: A Meta-Analytic Review of Correlational and Causal Associations."
"These findings indicate that building and activating students’ knowledge across subject areas like science, history, and literature is crucial for improving reading skills and that..." (1/2) #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
doi.org/10.1037/bul0...
I like how this model introduces motivation, habits, and sociocultural and cultural factors into how we think about the development and deployment of executive functions. The framework calls into question how EF researchers have addressed these issues in the past. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
Two hands reaching out toward each other against a golden sunset backdrop on a rocky hill.
📊 New #PSPB research: Embracing impartial beneficence - the principle that we should strive to improve others' well-being regardless of their relationship to us - does not preclude people from caring deeply about those close to them.
📑Read more: https://ow.ly/C9j350XIGzb
Silhouettes of six children holding hands and jumping joyfully against a sunset sky in a grassy field.
How do some children learn to eat some animals while continuing to care for others? New research suggests that this is caused by resolving the conflict between moral values and human cultural practices.
Read more in #SPPS: https://ow.ly/81NL50XHCS7
Excited to announce a new open-access EMP Lab paper on empathic AI: an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychology, philosophy, & engineering on motivated empathy expression and reception with social robots.
@ssripennstate.bsky.social
@psuliberalarts.bsky.social
@rockethics.bsky.social
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