Paul Maher

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest Guardian analysis shows images are the same, with Nekima Levy Armstrong looking composed in original but sobbing after alteration The White House posted a digitally altered image of a woman who was arrested on Thursday in a case touted by attorney general Pam Bondi, to make it seem as if she was dramatically crying, a Guardian analysis of the image has found. The woman, Nekima Levy Armstrong, also appears to have darker skin in the altered image. Armstrong was one of three people arrested on Thursday in connection to a demonstration that disrupted church services in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday. Demonstrators alleged that one of the pastors, David Easterwood, was the acting field director of the St Paul ICE office. Bondi announced the arrests on social media Thursday morning. Continue reading...

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest

📢 Post-doc position – Toulouse (France) 🇫🇷
A post-doctoral position (12 months) is open at CNRS in Toulouse to work with me on the relationship between signal detection theory, conspiracy beliefs, and perceptions of corruption...
🔗 emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...
Feel free to share!

Photo of Trinity College Dublin taken by Stefan Müller

Our neighbours at @tcdpoliticalsci.bsky.social are hiring 3 (!) tenure-track faculty members:

– Assistant Professor in Political Economy
– Assistant Professor in International Politics
– Assistant Professor in Political Science

Deadline: 15 Jan 2026
More details: jobs.tcd.ie
@tcddublin.bsky.social

The non unanimous vote was in the House. The unanimous passing refers to the Senate

Three preregistered experiments with prolific participants (N = 2,254) found no evidence for experimenter demand effects

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excellent chimeric face image showing off a left visual field bias for face processing - this image will tend to look more like John Travolta to observers, but the next one (see following post in this thread)... <1/2>

🚨2 ERC-funded Postdocs🚨
IDENTITY ERROR combines computational & experimental approaches to model epistemic vulnerability. 2 posts are available in our supportive & interdisciplinary team.

Further details:

Computational: my.corehr.com/pls/esbsheul...
Social Psych: my.corehr.com/pls/esbsheul...

Truth discernment may not help to overcome misinformation Nature Climate Change - Scientists increasingly assess interventions against misinformation mainly via truth discernment. However, pursuing truth discernment may not be sufficiently beneficial to...

In this new Commentary in @natclimate.nature.com, I reflect on the recent focus on truth discernment in #misinfo research and argue that this outcome alone may not be beneficial to society if interventions do not improve behaviour and other outcomes because... 1/

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

🟡 We are delighted to share that Social Psychological Bulletin has Impact Factor of 2.0!

🏅 Another big milestone for the once small and locally published journal - with more to come in the future.

@pspspl.bsky.social @psychopengold.bsky.social

Cognitive representations of social networks in isolated villages - Nature Human Behaviour Feltham et al. develop a sampling strategy to evaluate social network cognition across 82 Honduran villages, systematically mapping the underlying village networks.

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

Why is germ theory in the same air quotes as "miasma theory," I ask as a historian of medicine who is very very tired

Social identity networks: People holding attitudes are a collective social identity information system and bipartite networks are a useful way to represent them People holding attitudes are a social information system that can be modelled as a bipartite social identity network, where people are bound into groups via jointly held attitudes; and attitudes in...

10 years work has led to this:
Social identity networks: People holding attitudes are a collective social identity information system & bipartite networks are a useful way to represent them. European Review of Social Psychology. @polpsyispp.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/1046...

Psychological inoculation is a very popular intervention against online misinfo, but it hasn't been tested using real-world outcomes in realistic scenarios.

In a new paper just published in PNAS Nexus, this is what we did: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Short version: It didn't really work.

The self had a central role in early theories of psychopathology and has long been of interest to mental health practitioners. However, these early theories typically made what we consider to be two key errors: they conceptualized mental ill-health as constituting discrete categories of illness, and they conceptualized the self as inherently individualized and stable. There is a growing recognition in psychiatry and clinical psychology of the former error, with a change well underway to reconceptualize psychopathology in terms of transdiagnostic continua of symptoms rather than as discrete categories. At the same time, modern understandings of self-processes acknowledge their fluid, socially structured, and context-sensitive nature. Here, we argue that the integration of these two perspectives—into a self-categorization model of mental health with a healthy social self-system at its core—can provide new insights into both the nature of mental health and ill-health and the relevant focus for intervention. We illustrate this by exploring the implications of our analysis for three conditions (depression, schizophrenia, and autism) and report the findings of a verification study with experts in both social identity theorizing and clinical practice. We conclude by proposing key priorities for future research on self-categorization in mental health.

“The self-categorization model of mental health….predicts that intervention will be more likely to succeed where it helps to repair a particular component of the social self-system: inclusivity, positivity, or context sensitivity.”

Open Access: doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

#SocialPsyc #AcademicSky 🧪

We are hiring an Assistant Professor in Psychology for a permanent post!
Salary scale is €47,955 - €65,244 p.a.
Closing date is Noon Irish time on Friday, 30th May
More information at www.ul.ie/vacancies
Informal enquiries to eric.igou@ul.ie

Don't stand for political bullying of disinformation scholars | Editorial Among the targets of House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is the co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

5. Today, we are facing disinformation campaigns around science and medicine. These are coming from within our own government and are being carried out on a massive scale.

Researchers who study these dynamics are being harassed; funding is gone; universities are scared to hire in this area.

White House tweet with Trump holding a clearly manipulated photo purportedly of Abrego Garcia’s hand. MS 13 is written on his knuckles (in what I believe to be the ios default photo editor font).

Is the consensus among mainstream journalists that the White House slandering a man they delivered into slavery using a crudely manipulated photo in the president’s grasp in the Oval Office is just not a very newsworthy event?

Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale

Observed power, and what to do if your editor asks for post-hoc power analyses This blog post is now included in the paper "Sample size justification" available at PsyArXiv. Observed power (or post-hoc power) is th...

Sigh

another day, another colleague falls foul of post-hoc power calculation requests by a grant reviewer

@lakens.bsky.social 's blog page comes in handy for this nonsense

#episky

daniellakens.blogspot.com/2014/12/obse...

The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy The way we receive information about our world is unlike any previous generations of humanity. Paradoxically, it's destroying democracy—and Trump's America is the main canary in the coal mine.

I wrote about the biggest paradox of 21st century governance: that the democratization of information production is killing democracy. Trump’s America is the canary in the coal mine for how badly things can break when voters inhabit different realities from a steady diet of informational sludge.

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

As I wrote last week: "As other information sources fall, Wikipedia’s stubborn independence becomes more vital than ever. The attacks from [the right] aren't just about an online encyclopedia — they're part of a broader assault on any information source that refuses to be controlled."

Google search for "caffeine per day" AI Overview gives potentially deadly advice, suggesting that 10 energy drinks per day is 400mg caffeine. It's actually around 2000. "The recommended daily caffeine intake for healthy adults is up to 400 milligrams (mg). This is equivalent to about four cups of brewed coffee or 10 cans of energy drinks. However, individual caffeine tolerance varies, and some people may experience negative effects at lower doses. It is important to listen to your body and adjust your caffeine intake accordingly. Pregnant women, children, and people with certain medical conditions may need to limit their caffeine intake further. Consult with a healthcare professional for personalized advice."

How is this production technology?

Here's Google Gemini potentially getting someone killed. Ten energy drinks is typically 1600-3000 mg of caffeine.

Campaign Gist: Building a Wall

The six constituencies with the greatest risk of far-right gains and the best candidates in each place to vote for to block them.

https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-building-a-wall/

Thanks Alan! Will there be any updates to these models throughout the day?