Niels G. Mede

Trust in science is increasingly being studied across the globe—which is good news. However, expanding geographic coverage alone isn’t enough.

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

🎉 The PolComm Database Dashboard is live!

The database content is now available in an interactive dashboard: a milestone since launching submissions at #ICA25 in Denver.

Explore this resource here
👉 politicalcommunication.org/resources/

Perhaps a combination of several things, including true difference, different conceptions of what “science” means, and presumably some sort of acquiescence bias

@matthewfacciani.bsky.social, co-author of our latest study on science communication behavior in 68 countries, just published a blog post with a great summary of the main results. Check it out! ⬇️

How the World Talks About Science Our new international study finds that science communication looks very different depending on culture, media systems, and access to technology.

How do people around the world encounter science, and what shapes those encounters?

Our new global study found that social media now carries much of the world’s science content, but local culture, infrastructure, and curiosity still determine how people engage. #ScienceSky #scicomm

Thanks for the repost, @nordeco.bsky.social!

Thanks a lot for the shout-out, Kim! 🙏

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Many thanks, @maibached.bsky.social. It's really a pleasure to be able to work with you and all the other members of the #TISP project.

Thanks for sharing, @oceanhelen.bsky.social, I hope our work is useful for you and other people researching/practicing science communication 💪

...and we're excited to have you as a member of our project! Looking forward to your newsletter post 🙌

Thank you for the repost, Philipp. We're glad to have you on the team!

‪Thanks a lot for the shout-out, @todorova.bsky.social - and for being part of this project!

So happy to see this out! 🎉 We surveyed people from 68 countries about how they encounter and engage with information about science!

See the thread below for a summary of the main findings 👇

Congratulations to the whole team, especially @nielsmede.bsky.social and @colognaviktoria.bsky.social 👏

Muchas gracias for the repost, Cintia, and for being part of the #TISP project!

Feel free to share, @pcstnetwork.bsky.social, @eusea.bsky.social, @esci.eu, @sciencetalkorg.bsky.social, #EUPRIO @scicommcentre.eu, @icahdq.bsky.social 📣

🙏 Massive thanks to the #TISP consortium, especially my project co-leader @colognaviktoria.bsky.social. They collected the data, helped writing and revising the manuscript, and provided countless insights into local contexts that had been unknown to me. You folks are amazing 🫶

🔁 All analyses are fully #reproducible with the code and data available at @cos.io’s #OpenScienceFramework: osf.io/gvcfe/. We published the complete dataset here: bsky.app/profile/niel...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

👀 See the full paper for many more results and a detailed discussion of regional patterns. They are relevant not only for future #scicomm research, but also for science #policy, #funding, #education, and science communication #practice: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

5️⃣ Limits to democratic deliberation and #freedom of speech may not decrease willingness to participate in public #protests on science matters.

4️⃣ Less educated populations (according to #PISA scores) tend to discuss #science more frequently with others.

3️⃣ Low press freedom and limited #academic #freedom do not necessarily prevent public engagement with science.

2️⃣ Little access to #digital media is associated with more offline #engagement with science (museums, zoos, public talks).

Some key findings:
1️⃣ #Social #media are the most important source of information about science in most countries – but traditional #news media remain relevant, particularly in Northwestern Europe.

Published today: One of the biggest #science #communication studies to date. We asked 71,922 people in 68 countries how they #engage with information about #science and combined the data with several country-level factors: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #OpenAccess

New publication alert🔓🚨
Toxic speech is widespread on social media – but do users mirror the toxic behavior of their ingroup or react defensively to outgroup toxicity?
Our new paper in JCMC examines how ingroup and outgroup behavior shape the spread of toxicity on social media.

If you've been reading that fantastic new paper by @dasalgon.bsky.social & @tevoelker.bsky.social on how mainstream parties lose if they adopt far-right issues:
We looked at a case study & found similar dynamics for media.
This was partly based on data from Daniel & Teresa!❤️
bsky.app/profile/curd...

New paper out on trust in science in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

🙏 to @nielsmede.bsky.social and @colognaviktoria.bsky.social for initiating the TISP project and to @juliametag.bsky.social for her helpful input throughout the project. Free-access link: shorturl.at/4VBAJ

Is research performance related to academic freedom? A preprint co-authored with @lutzb.bsky.social conducts a large-scale empirical analysis on the national level to this question. osf.io/2mh8f #academicfreedom #AcademicFreedomIndex Short 🧵

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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