Nick Ballou

How can scientists avoid gaslighting people about digital harms and contribute to solutions — while also maintaining our commitment to following the evidence?

New post out with Alan Smith, manager of Community Leadership for @consumerreports.org

innovation.consumerreports.org/bad-if-true-...

Today, we presented the main results of the mental health days study 2025 (N = 8.177).

Results

> In May 2025, Austria implemented a nationwide smartphone-ban at schools
> Compared to 2024, smartphone use went down by 30 mins
> Life satisfaction went up (5.36 to 5.52)
> Depression sank (15% to 12%)

made me think about @cjvanlissa.bsky.social and co's recent work (doi.org/10.31234/osf...) as well as a much less incisive but aligned piece I wrote about problems in psych games research during my PhD (osf.io/fp89z)

While we can continue to identify the factors atplay indefinitely, this digresses the literature intoa fact-gathering exercise. And such an exerciseis not enough to spawn cumulative understanding.In the words of Poincaré, "[s]cience is built upof facts, as a house is built of stones; but an ac-cumulation of facts is no more a science than aheap of stones is a house" (Poincaré, 1905, ch. 9)

finally got around to reading @tobiasdienlin.com @yesuncomm.bsky.social & @lennertcoenen.bsky.social's "A simple future for media effects research"

Such a clear and compelling summary of why we (media researchers, but really any psych-adjacent field) are stuck and how to dig ourselves out

UX complaint of the day: can we please agree to call it "country of citizenship" instead of "nationality" in web forms so I don't have to check every time whether the available option is American/United States or Netherlands/Dutch

So...my undergrad thesis student is doing a quality analysis of studies found in meta-analyses. She identified a few and we contacted the authors to request their effect sizes and other variables for the studies in their papers.

Here's what happened:

scientiapsychiatrica.com/index.php/Sc...

What an obsequious, toadying, servile, brown-nosing, corrupt little cunt Gianni Infantino is.

The FIFA 'peace prize' is the most cringe-worthy, pathetic thing I've ever seen in my life.

Football deserves better than this travesty of a ceremony and ruling body.

We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense.

Incredible interview with the Roblox CEO, immediately combative and somehow in favor of implementing prediction markets for children.

I'm generally supportive of their new age assurance safety features, but without independent auditing, my trust remains very low.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/p...

A screenshot of the article title "Disconnect to Recharge: Well-Being Benefits of Digital Disconnection in Daily Life" and the abstract.

📬 Pub alert

Do effects of digital disconnection interventions translate to well-being benefits in *daily life*?

Our new ESM study concludes: yes but no... kinda 👽🔋
@klingelhoefer.bsky.social @adrianmeier.bsky.social

Out now in Communication Research
doi.org/10.1177/0093...

NEW PREPRINT 💡

Together with @dougaparry.bsky.social, I just published a new preprint experimentally examining how specific normative cues on social media shape self-disclosure using an innovative simulation approach.

Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Read on for more information (1/9) 👇

American TV commercials have always been unhinged but I've never felt like so much of a foreigner as this past visit home. Just non-stop sports gambling and pharmaceuticals, on broadcasts like the world series with millions of children watching. A ticking time bomb with a very short fuse.

dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap `genzplyr` is an alternative syntax for `dplyr` that replaces boring old function names with GenZ slang. Your data wrangling is about to hit different.

I love this so much, and will absolutely being using squad_up() instead of group_by() and main_character() instead of pull() from now on, reviewers don't @ me

hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

New release of PowerLMM.js! Browser-based power analysis for longitudinal models with dropout.

Now includes:
- Power analysis summary report
- Reproducible & shareable configs (URL/JSON)
- Calculations validated against R
- Hypothesis region visualization

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

An aerial photograph of the Tilburg University campus.

I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social.

We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.

tiu.nu/22989

is this a separate list from a normal to-do list, or you just consciously order your todos by priority from time to time?

yes, the menial sense of accomplishment from productive procrastination definitely sustains this trick I'm playing on myself! Worth a shot to try blocking different half days for it.

oh this looks really interesting, thanks for sharing!

As a PhD student, one of my most adaptive habits was doing any <30m task immediately, to clear time for focused work.

The problem is, now <30m tasks could fill most work days, but I can't shake the habit - I want the peace of mind before undertaking chunky work. How do other people handle this?

Why gaming can be good for your mental health - BBC Bitesize Gaming can positively impact mental health balancing mood, help build social connections and provide a safe space to explore identity.

New! Did you know gaming can improve your mental health? Watch @nballou.bsky.social @mentalhealthoii.bsky.social @oii.ox.ac.uk explaining how gaming can lift your mood in this new film from BBC Bitesize. #gaming bit.ly/4pEKWYQ

🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media.

🧵

Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited?

It turns out, yes!

GAMES: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE | ACM Digital Library Games: Research and Practice offers a lighthouse for games research – a central reference point that defines the state of the art on games and playable media across academic research and industry practice. Inclusive in community, discipline, method, and game form, it publishes major reviews, tutorials, and advances on games and playable media that are both practically useful and grounded in robust evidence and argument, alongside case studies, opinions, and dialogues on new developments that will change games. It embraces open science and scholarship and actively champions new and underrepresented voices in games and playable media.

Annoyed by gross/sexist/AI/... slop in mobile game ads?

Now is the time to write about it!

Submit to @acmgames.bsky.social Special Issue on Game Advertising, submission deadline Oct 31.

All details here: dl.acm.org/journal/game...

Forget Tomb Raider and Uncharted, there’s a new generation of games about archaeology – sort of In this week’s newsletter: an archaeologist (and gamer) on why we love to walk around finding objects in-game and in real life

I wrote a piece for the Guardian games newsletter this week on my PhD research into preserving play experiences, and why I think that the most archaeological games are those that that actually make you *think* like one 🏺

www.theguardian.com/games/2025/s...

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

Possible futures all at once: time frame and time lag in short-term longitudinal media effects research on well-being Abstract. When assessing media effects, we seldom consider how they change over time. Especially with the prevalence of smartphone use as short-lived, frag

To investigate media effects, do we have to think more clearly about time ⌚? Our new publication in the 🎉*Journal of Communication*🎉 investigates how our conceptualizations of time can affect our conclusions: doi.org/10.1093/joc/... (1/6)

congratulations! 🎉🎉 absolutely love the earrings

Kids These Days...behavior problems aren't changing.

In over 418,000 children from nationally-representative samples, child behavior problems are pretty similar as in the 1980s, with most changes being improvements, not declines.

Our work led by Zsofia Takacs
#psych #phdsky

osf.io/63egm_v1/dow...

I strive to be an inbox zero person so email snoozing is a godsend, but there's no worse feeling than receiving an email I didn't want to deal with, snoozed, and promptly forgot about...for the second time.

The amount of cabbage contained in a single cabbage amazes me every time. Like, I understand why people used to havd 8 children because that's how many I'd need to finish one of these damn things

for the first time in its 83-year modern history, the phrase "peer reviews" appeared in today's NYT crossword! (seemingly one of the few science-friendly institutions the US has left.)

The singular form has appeared one other time, in 2012.

(No screenshot lest I spoil more than one answer)

participatory DAGs + careful missing data handling + target pop weighting on this topic? be still my heart 🔥