This is cool work on a methodological level, but I also really like how “assortative mating on liability to divorce” is essentially a six-word relationship drama.

What a difference a mind makes: How evolved difference detecting mechanisms harm psychological science, and how an evolutionary psychology of psychology can help From an adaptationist perspective, most of psychology's concepts that form the basis of empirical inquiry, such as memory, attention, consciousness, i…

Why is domain-generality so intuitive? This paper makes a case for why we need an evolutionary psychology of psychology, and what it has to say about the study of intelligence, consciousness, domain-generality, and the theory crisis.
@pdurkee.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Its notable that some (in this case @mendelrandom.bsky.social (George Davey-Smith)) were on to him while he was alive, video a young GDS confronting Eysenk in a Q&A in 1994 for his data being inconsistent: youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

The attractive personality: Like me, but better People tend to prefer mates who are similar to themselves, yet also desire partners with specific characteristics. The relative importance of assortat…

"These findings suggest that ideal partner preferences are shaped by one's own traits, especially for political personality, but some traits (e.g., low neuroticism) are broadly preferred across individuals."

doi.org/10.1016/j.ev...

I strongly recommend @hugoreasoning.bsky.social's book "Not Born Yesterday" if you've been exposed to too much social psychology about irrationality in your youth. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...

Genes linked to sexlessness overlap with genes associated with:
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk

"Our understanding of the stability in attachment during the first two decades of life is limited...I found little support for an early-formed prototype being responsible for stability. In sum, there was little continuity in attachment from childhood to adolescence"
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

"To assume that children are fashioned in such a way that their adult behavior is contingent on their experiences with their parents in the first few years of life is not just to underrate them but to underrate evolution itself."

Attachment and Political Personality are Heritable and Distinct Systems, and Both Share Genetics with Interpersonal Trust and Altruism - Behavior Genetics The attachment and caregiving domains maintain proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that has been argued to shape people’s mental models of how relationships work...

"Contrary to popular and long-standing accounts of the causes and consequences of attachment styles, we find no evidence that attachment and ideology are jointly grounded in early familial experiences."

Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Culture College plays a big role in shaping the culture of the symbolic professions... but not for the reasons most think.

"As the work of Hugo Mercier and others shows, it’s really hard to change people’s minds . . . With respect to colleges and universities . . . empirical research consistently finds that students’ typically change very little over the course of their college education."

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The modern nature-nurture debate has been boiled down to a sterile empirical question about whether "genes" or "environment" are more important for the explanation of human differences. For almost any trait that people care about, that question has no interesting answer."

Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education.

Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Probably the most important paper in personality psych this decade just dropped. 👀 Interesting genetic correlations between other traits (the #1 reason for GWASs on social traits IMO), and evidence of weak but non-zero assortative mating on personality.

"John [...] thought awakening people to [the social dynamics created by our coalitional psychology] might help us—humanity—avoid some of the terrible suffering our coalitional instincts cause. Unfortunately, he ran out of time."

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Does anyone know of useful literature on "adjusting for confounds" in statistical models? I put it in scare quotes because I am often unconvinced that the methods commonly used actually achieve that...

🚨 Big question, big paper! Why does educational inequality run in families?
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵

Reviewer notes: That’s a very nice mediation analysis you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Mediation analysis has gotten a lot of flak, including classic titles such as “Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer)” (Bullock et al., 2010), “What mediation analysis can (not) ...

«…if such an [cross-sectional mediation] analysis is the centerpiece of an article and the authors do nothing to credibly address confounding, they are trying to sell elaborate causal storytelling based on three correlations in a trench coat.»

www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

Reviewer notes: That’s a very nice mediation analysis you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Mediation analysis has gotten a lot of flak, including classic titles such as “Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer)” (Bullock et al., 2010), “What mediation analysis can (not) ...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words!

If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.

www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

"Since AI reduces the cost of generating misinformation to nearly zero, analysts who look at misinformation as a supply problem are very concerned. But analyzing the demand for misinformation can clarify how misinformation spreads and what interventions are likely to help."

🧪 How are risk factors like parental mental illness and low education distributed across families? This cool new paper explores how couples resemble each other — both before and (even more so) after meeting. A highly recommended read for those interested in intergenerational mobility + genetics.

I'm thrilled to share this work from my time at @ox.ac.uk (Department of Psychiatry), in which we investigate temporal and contemporaneous within-person associations between adolescent mental health difficulties and various aspects of the family environment 🧵

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Non-random mating patterns within and across education and mental and somatic health - Nature Communications By analyzing 187,926 Norwegian first-time parents, researchers found that partners are more similar in mental than physical health, with mental health similarity increasing over time. Educational simi...

"We observed vast cross-trait assortment for mental health conditions, indicating that individuals match on overall mental health, rather than on specific health conditions. The link with education might indicate trade-offs for overall attractiveness."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yesterday I gave a talk at @imprs-life.bsky.social in Berlin on how siblings shape our personalities. It was a lot of fun to talk about my substantive work for a change!
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk

I’m looking for psychology papers that use a rigorous causal inference approach with observational data. I’d like to find some great examples to showcase in my teaching.

Any recommendations?

#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci

A large scale effort to replicate evidence that infants prefer prosocial agents suggests that infants don't consistently prefer prosocial agents. This is progress. Science is hard.

No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Disadvantageous inequity aversion (IA), a negative response to receiving less than others, is a key building block of the human sense of fairness. While some theorize that IA is shared by species acro...

New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter

Parenthood, Mental Disorders, and Symptoms Through Adulthood: A Total Population Study ML Andersen*, HF Sunde, RK Hart, FA Torvik *Corresponding author(s). E-mail(s): MariaLyster.Andersen@fhi.no; Abstract During recent decades, parenthood has declined in many Western countries. Simultaneously, mental disorders have become more prevalent. We investigated the link between parenthood and mental health in the entire Norwegian-born population aged 31 to 80 from 2006 to 2019 (n=2,234,087). We used logistic regression models on national register data and included sibling- and twin-matched analyses to address unobserved confounders. Parenthood was associated with a lower risk of mental disorders, including depressive and anxiety disorders. For symptoms related to mental disorders, fathers had a reduced risk, while mothers had a slightly elevated risk. Mental health disparities between parents and non-parents were greater among men than among women and persisted across adulthood, before reducing at older ages. Our main findings were largely consistent in sibling- and twin-matched designs. The disparity between parents and non-parents increased over the study period, suggesting stronger selection into parenthood. Our findings highlight parenthood as a significant indicator of mental health inequalities, with its importance growing over time. Keywords: Mental health, parenthood, childlessness, social inequality, fertility JEL Classification: I14, J13, J16

Two figures. Top figure (a) shows the prevalence of mental disorders and symptoms by parent-status, age, and gender. X-axis is age, and y-axis is prevalence in percent. The prevalence curves for mental disorders are higher for the childless than for parents. For symptoms, the prevalence curve is higher for childless men than fathers. For women, the two lines are much closer. The curve for childless women is higher until approximately age 40, then the two curves are similar until age 70. After 70, the prevalence curve for mothers is above the curve for childless women. Bottom figure (b) shows estimated odds ratios for a variety of logistic and conditional logistic regression models. For mental disorders, all estimated odds ratios are below 1, meaning that parents have a lower likelihood of having a mental disorder. For symptoms, the estimated odds ratios vary, sometimes above 1 (for women) and sometimes below 1 (for men). The magnitude of the estimates differ between the models of symptoms and disorders. For disorders, estimated odds ratios are in the range 0.44-0.71, while for symptoms the range is 0.80-1.19.

New preprint 📈📉

🧠👶🏻 We explored the link between parenthood and mental health in over 2M Norwegians using primary health care records. We found that parents generally experienced fewer mental disorders, even after accounting for factors like education and marital status.

🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2024...