PhD Student in Meta-Science and Clinical Psychology - Universität Bern Universität Bern is looking for PhD Student in Meta-Science and Clinical Psychology

I’m hiring a PhD student!

The candidate will work alongside @zefreeman.bsky.social, who is joining our research group as postdoc.

jobs.unibe.ch/job-vacancie...

How do people decide whether it’s wrong to harm a pig? A chimp? A baby?

In the West, these judgments are based more on *experience* (being able to feel) than on *agency* (being able to think and act)

New study finds that same pattern across other cultures

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Proud of this paper; five years in the making. Correcting consumer beliefs about carbon impact of meat products (controlling for salience and social norms) does *not* lead to any change in consumption behavior in our setting. Any effects of carbon labels are likely to work through salience/norms.

🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨

ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts.

internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/

Screen shot of section 1.1 of the report "vision for a new publication culture"

The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices.

Take a read:

www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys.

Spoiler alert: they aren't

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SCORE | Center for Open Science SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

The *majority* of philosophy papers now cite at least some empirical data. Papers that do purely a priori philosophy are in a minority

It looks like more work is needed to get a better understanding of how perceiver characteristics and target characteristics interact to shape impression formation.

Data and R code available here: osf.io/eugd4

In Study 2 (n = 367) we used two alternative stimulus sets and an improved study design and analysis approach. Again, we did not find convincing support for any of the hypotheses.

In Study 1 (n = 273) we used the same stimuli and analysis strategy as the original studies. Both frequentist and Bayesian analyses did to show support for the hypotheses.

We review several limitations for this line of evidence. We then conducted 2 replication studies in which we tested hypothesized relations between impression of people who vary in apparent extraversion and 3 perceiver characteristics: pathogen concern, affiliative needs, & sociosexual orientation.

For example, extraverted people have larger social networks and more social contact making them a more likely source of infectious disease. Perceivers who score high on pathogen concern may therefore avoid them (= negative first impressions).

One series of papers highlights the role of perceiver needs. Extraverted-looking targets were perceived more positively by perceivers whose social needs are more likely to be met by extraverted individuals.

The same facial features can trigger very different impressions for different perceivers. How can we explain this? Which perceiver characteristics influence impression formation?

Hundreds of studies have tested how targets' facial features influence perceivers' impressions. But work by @erichehman.bsky.social & others shows that there are also large individual differences in impressions formation.

New paper out in @irsp-rips.bsky.social

We tested three claims about how individual differences shape impression formation.

rips-irsp.com/articles/10....

Checking for Statistical Errors in Primary Studies: A Way to Improve Meta-Analytic Evidence? — Meta-Research Center This blogpost was written by dr. Olmo van den Akker. He is a postdoc in our department working on two projects: a systematic review of studies that simulate p-hacking, and a randomized controlled tria...

Should we use error checking tools like Statcheck and GRIM to automatically check for errors in studies in meta-analyses?

I wrote a blog post with some insights from a hackathon where we scrutinized this idea.

metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/3/...

Data and code available here: osf.io/gnbve/

In short, our study provides cross-cultural evidence for the idea that entities are afforded greater moral standing when people think they are capable of experiencing of pain, pleasure, & other affective states.

Crucially, we found that perceived sentience was positively associated with attributions of moral standing in each country.

Associations for the other two mind dimensions were less consistent across countries & usually non-significant.

In each country, participants attributed more moral standing to entities that were perceived to have more complex minds.

Participants rated a diverse set of human & non-human entities.

The average moral standing of entities was surprisingly similar across the different countries.

In our study, we examined the relation between perceived mental capacities (sentience, perceptual-cognitive agency, sociomoral agency) & attributions of moral standing with participants from Brazil, India, Italy, Nigeria, the Philippines, & Saudi Arabia.

But follow-up work sometimes found different patterns of results & virtually all studies were run with participants from the Global North.

Seminal work by @kurtjgray.bsky.social & others found that the perceived capacity for affective experiences like pain & pleasure (i.e., sentience) is crucial & more important than perceived agentic capacities (e.g., having goals, interests).

People are more likely to attribute moral standing to an entity if it is perceived to have a more complex mental life.

There has been some debate about which mental capacities are crucial.

Putting the normative questions of how we *should* attribute moral standing aside, we were interested in how laypeople make these judgments.

One stream of research proposes that "mind perception" is at the core of these moral judgments.

Does a 1-month-old embryo have the right to live? Is it OK to kill animals for food?

Many hotly debated questions are about the moral standing of different entities: Do their welfare & interests matter intrinsically from a moral perspective?

Now published in Psych Science: doi.org/10.1177/0956...

We explored cultural differences in how people across six different countries attribute moral standing.