Brit Davidson

We are looking for a research assistant to help us develop tools to make dashboards easier for social scientists to create 🤩

If you are really into R and passionate about data and science communication, please apply!

Value alignment (supposedly aligning LLMs w/ human values) has become powerful not only in AI safety research but also informing regulation. yet, most of it is neither about humans nor human values & every paper=“here’s an algorithm for aligning to human preferences" & a bunch of math & benchmarks

How memes spread conspiracy theories – and what to consider before sharing one Harmful stereotypes, misinformation and conspiracy theories have all found their way into meme format.

🔗I’m thrilled to share my latest article for
@uk.theconversation.com! In it, I explore how memes have become powerful vehicles for spreading dangerous ideas—including conspiracy theories—and what we should all consider before sharing one.

Such an amazing piece of work! I am so proud of you and thrilled this is out!

A new study from @emilygodwin.bsky.social and @britdavidson.bsky.social shows the sinister side to memes, revealing their role in strengthening online communities of conspiracy theorists and helping to spread harmful beliefs
www.bath.ac.uk/announcement...

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

I am excited to share my latest research paper published in Social Media + Society, titled 'Internet Memes as Stabilizers of Conspiracy Culture: A Cognitive Anthropological Analysis' and co-authored with @britdavidson.bsky.social, Tim Hill, and Adam Joinson.

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

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

So excited to see my first first-author paper out in print!
Rage against the machine: exploring violence and emotion in conspiracy narratives on Parler
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
special thank you to my supervisors @britdavidson.bsky.social, Lukasz Piwek and Jonathan Roscoe

Proud supervisor moment 👏 my fab PhD student Johnny has finished his first paper, looking at smart tech, privacy, and security. Specifically looking at smart doorbells in neighbourhoods and how individual choices impact those around us. 🔐
📖📚Have a read, link to the preprint is here: osf.io/g9dpt

we badly need healthy public awareness around AI (it’s harms, failures, downstream impacts… not the current hype AI companies push through and the media parrots with 0 critical scrutiny) as much as we need better, enforceable regulation

one of the world leading research institutes that prides itself in responsible & public benefiting AI: we want you to write a blog post

me: sure, I can write about my expertise; holding those that are developing/deploying harmful AI accountable

them: let's not be overly critical of powerful actors

Examining the replicability of online experiments selected by a decision market - Nature Human Behaviour This study finds that decision markets can be a useful tool for selecting studies for replication. For a sample of 26 online experiments published in PNAS selected by a decision market, the authors fi...

New in NHB: We systematically replicated 26 of 41 PNAS social science studies that used MTurk. The approach provides a proof-of-concept for using decision markets to select findings to replicate.

Replication effect sizes were 45% of original effect sizes.

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

Edinburgh University warns staff to expect job cuts The institution blamed "unsustainable" funding and a fall in student numbers for the decision.

Hearing from former colleagues about this and it seems an utter management fiasco as ever at Edinburgh.

School Heads weren't warned the redundancy email was going out.

At the all-staff meeting the next day Senior Management then refused to provide any specifics...

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Auditing Political Exposure Bias: Algorithmic Amplification on Twitter/X Approaching the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Approximately 50% of tweets in X's user timelines are personalized recommendations from accounts they do not follow. This raises a critical question: what political content are users exposed to beyond...

A rent paper has been portrayed in the news as proof that Twitter/X new #recsys favors republicans.

In our latest work, collecting millions of datapoints via 120 sock puppets, we should the reality is much more complex: you would be surprised by our findings:
arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852

thread 1/n

Now is the time to archive the gov data and webpages that you depend on for your research. They may not be there in the future. #AcademicSky

Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) eBook : Etchells, Pete: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) eBook : Etchells, Pete: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

If you’re interested/worried about the effects of screens, phones and social media, my book, Unlocked, is still just 99p on Kindle at the moment: www.amazon.co.uk/Unlocked-Sci...

Oxford relying on ‘Deliveroo-style’ contracts with most tutorials not taught by full-time staff Leading university accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

Horrifying statistics obtained by UCU show 61% of undergraduate tutorials at Oxford colleges done by junior academics on fixed-term contracts or in hourly-paid roles. Colleges pay many below minimum wage in the UK, after accounting for preparation and marking.

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Getting the US numbers to “say” what an autocrat wants them to say is a lot harder than creating the impression that the numbers are unreliable, civil servants are untrustworthy/stupid, and methods are corrupt. Numbers don’t speak for themselves. They have interpreters, for better and for worse.

🚨New preprint 🚨

**A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media**

🧵

We develop a computational reward learning model of real-world social media data, which infers the separate goal-directed and habitual cognitive processes driving posting...

A Boston psychiatrist weighs in on the Mass. TikTok lawsuit and digital wellness The co-founder of Boston Children's Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders, Dr. Michael Tsappis joins Radio Boston to talk about digital wellness.

“When kids hear 'you’re addicted, you're addicted, you're addicted,' they don’t necessarily feel cared for - they feel criticised. They feel as if they’re being punished, and the devices are taken away”

www.wbur.org/radioboston/...

Network Science Institute starter pack in BlueSky! A list of members and alumni (to be updated)

go.bsky.app/N3PQTdw

Judgment and Decision Making JDM by @dggoldst.bsky.social

Diversity Scientists in Social Psychology by @joelleforestier.bsky.social

List of psychology-related starter packs!
#Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 🧵

Cross-Cultural Psychology and Quant Anthropology
by @drboothroyd.bsky.social

I made a starter pack for computational sociologists. Please DM if you think you should be added (or taken off!)

go.bsky.app/U1Wia61

Assessing computational reproducibility in Behavior Research Methods - Behavior Research Methods Psychological science has thrived thanks to new methods and innovative practices. Journals, including Behavior Research Methods (BRM), continue to support the dissemination and evaluation of research ...

"Software that doesn't run is kind of pointless"
New Registered Report, led by David Ellis, considers whether psych research artefacts (software, data, databases, etc) are plug&play or more like plug&weep, and how they fare (and FAIR) over time.

(1)

doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Fascinating look into the alt-tech platform Parler from
@darja.bsky.social, Piwek, Roscoe, &
@britdavidson.bsky.social

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

My fab PhD student @darja.bsky.social’s first paper! Give it a read, it’s all about #conspiracytheories, their narratives, and violent outcomes. Fascinating and critically important work to lay groundwork to find early stage interventions!

New preprint! How often do editors/reviewers actually compare preregistrations to the reporting in the article? Almost never. This figure sums up all of the results. Not good.