This week in Social/Developmental was about generational differences, or as I referred to it:
“ @bwroberts.bsky.social and friends keep bludgeoning the zombie horse that won’t die”

An AI-powered research assistant in the lab: A practical guide for text analysis through iterative collaboration with LLMs - Behavior Research Methods Analyzing texts such as open-ended responses, headlines, or social media posts is a time- and labor-intensive process highly susceptible to bias. However, large language models (LLMs) are promising to...

Qualitative coding 3,183 open-ended responses by hand would take 80+ hours. With an LLM-assisted workflow, Gino Carmona-Díaz and colleagues in Colombia did it in 10. ICC = .824. Full tutorial, prompts, and code are open access.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Once you start thinking about implausibly large effect sizes, you can't stop spotting them around you or wondering how others aren't doing so.

Harkin et al.'s (2016) meta analysis has 740+ citations, but it reports Cohen d values as large as 14. 17 cases of d>4.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-...

New paper on planned missingness. Recently been liking the approach of planned missingness in a survey -> FIML to estimate constructs.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics?
1) Write NSF
2) Write your Congressperson
3) CC us at grfp@grant-witness.us so we can compile + follow up

Details and template at grant-witness.us/grfp-letter

Replying to Brent on cross lagged panel models Last week, Brent Roberts blogged on “The Inconceivability of the CLPM and RI-CLPM”.

Replying to @bwroberts.bsky.social on cross-lagged panel models

open.substack.com/pub/drewhalb...

PIG-IE Reading List The Personality Interest Group—Including Espresso Reading List

The Personality Interest Group Including Espresso journal club (PIG-IE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign now has a public reading schedule: pig-ie-reading-vote.lovable.app/schedule. 1/

The Inconceivability of the CLPM and RI-CLPM Written by Brent Roberts and not ChatGTP. Really* The existence of an observational scientist can be a frustrating affair. Relegated to second class citizen status due to interest in phenomena that…

A bit of a Festivus inspired post about CLPMs and RI-CLPMs: floggingpvalues.blog/2026/01/20/t...

Average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" plotted over time

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?).

Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

I will be curious to see the public reception of this paper, which is in production at AMPPS (I was the AE). This is the early draft before revision after review: osf.io/preprints/os...

These openscience.nl grants are wonderful. Lavaan is a stand out in quality and impact.

Open software supports so much research in academia and industry, but exists in some unincentivized gray zone. At the same time, so much software is poorly documented and tested. Fix with recognition and support

Today I note how, after Florida implemented their #cellphoneban in schools, Florida's national standardized testing scores dropped.

We need to work harder to improve schools by improving schools, not by banning technology.

www.tallahassee.com/story/opinio...

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨

We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait

The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

Despite Prepublication Peer Review being a core part of science, training materials for it are sparse. This open source guide is very valuable for ECRs!

ecr-reviewers.gitlab.io/guide/

New paper in press at JPSP! An adversarial collaboration focusing on a large-scale test of how strongly implicit racial attitudes predict discriminatory behavior. Pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

📣 Digital Research Community!

The new UK Adolescent Health Study will follow 100k young people (8–18yrs) for 10+ years. Please share what digital technology measures you think it should include.

Please complete this survey (by 24th November 2025 @ 9AM): cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!!

Goodness gracious.

A bunch of academics posing on the stairs of the UIUC psychology building

Had a great day yesterday with the first annual Midwestern Personality Meeting held in our own Champaign/Urbana. H/T to @cavanvbonner.bsky.social, Muchen Xi, and Derek Simon for organizing. @chops310.bsky.social @rcfraley.bsky.social @jaime.phd @jessiesun.bsky.social @joshuajackson.bsky.social

Youyou Tu's work on anti-malarial compounds that saved millions of lives (w/Nobel+Lasker recognition) wins the low citation/huge impact cell. The original paper has 87 citations as of today: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11721477/ Hopefully she can get to 100.

What for huge citations and moderate impact?

AI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points

People are lazy--except when they're watching other people work hard.

My student Emily Zohar just published her first first-authored paper, and it reveals something surprising about effort and social norms. /1

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The (In)Effectiveness of Psychological Targeting: A Meta‐Analytic Review The use of psychological targeting—employing machine learning to predict consumer personality from digital footprints and subsequently tailoring persuasive messages—has emerged as a controversial yet...

"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be
predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."

To be honest? Thank god.

Because if advertisers can target on personality, this will be what it looks like (from 'Careless People')

Has conscientiousness really been in a free fall since 2014?* Brent W. RobertsA.J. WrightLena RoemerCavan Bonner Recently Burn-Murdoch reported in the Financial Times (FT) that since 2014 conscientiousness was in a “free fall” in younger p…

Has conscientiousness really been in a free fall since 2014? A question that made us blog again: Has conscientiousness really been in a free fall since 2014?*
floggingpvalues.blog/2025/10/22/h...

Preprint led by Salvador Vargas (on the job market!), with Chadly Stern, on stereotypes linking race & social class. We find a mean-level White–rich/Black–poor stereotype; the stereotype is strongest among third-group participants; and likely explained by social sampling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Major win for our field: finally a large, replicable effect.

Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank - Social Indicators Research How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.

The GSS asked the same people about their childhood income rank three different times. 56% changed their answer, even though what was trying to be measured couldn’t change! We dig into this in a new article at @socialindicators.bsky.social. 



doi.org/10.1007/s112...

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📣 Calling 2nd-year grad students and their mentors:

You just abruptly lost the ability to apply for the NSF grad research fellowship.

Join ~900 others (and growing!) in signing @omfishient.bsky.social's petition to reverse that.

[Or reshare this petition if you're not directly impacted]

An arrow with a LaTeX equation

Trigonometric functions and a unit circle

A bivariate change model with structured residuals

A hierarchical model of cognitive abilities

Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other.
wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...