Nicole Schwitter

Congratulations! 🥳

Screenshot of the call for applications for MZES Visiting Fellowships, 22 September 2025. For the full text, please follow the link.

📣 Attention, postdoctoral researchers!

❗ Apply now for our MZES Visiting Fellowships 😊

💡 Spend 2-4 weeks at the MZES to share ideas
💰 Funding for accommodation, travel, daily allowance
📆 Deadline: 28 November

Full information:
👉 www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/deta...

"I'm just a goat, standing in front of a contestant, asking them to choose me"

Monty Hall reminder: the only good reason to want the car is to sell it for more goats.

🚨 New working paper alert 🚨
Missing summer — and the Tour de France? Don’t worry, we got you covered. 🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️
In this paper, we show that being on the route of Tour de France reduces far-right voting. osf.io/preprints/so...

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

The (mis)use of Google Trends data in the social sciences - A systematic review, critique, and recommendations Researchers increasingly use aggregated search data from Google Trends to study a wide range of phenomena. Although this new data source possesses som…

ICYMI: If you’re working or are planning on working with Google Trends Data for research, make sure to read this article by @floriankeusch.bsky.social & co-authors. They explore common pitfalls, incl. construct validity and reliability, and show how to improve data quality to enhance robustness.

Thanks for the recognition! 🥳 My USP: delivering reviews before the reminders.

Reviewing, and doing it well, is one of the best services one can do to our profession. Massive thanks to the winners of the #ecsr2025 Best Reviewer Award: @saidhassan.bsky.social, @katyaoivanova.bsky.social, Nicole Schwitter

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.

Apply by: 10 Oct

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Call for Papers and/or research designs for a workshop on "Survey Experiments in the Social Sciences" at the University of Amsterdam in October.

@bramlancee.bsky.social and I are organising the 3rd AMCIS Workshop on "Survey Experiments in the Social Sciences", 1-2 October 2025 in Amsterdam.
We are looking for Papers and/or Research Designs. Please email your submission to me and Bram, submission deadline is 27/08/2025.

@aissr.bsky.social

🔈Job Alert! IAS is looking for a postdoctoral researcher as part of the Swedish Excellence Center in Computational Social Science -SWECSS.

⌛Deadline: September 30th
Apply 👉 liu.se/en/work-at-l...

#academicsky #css

Karl Marx labubu... no, labour theory of value

🤖💡 Are LLMs really developing social behaviors—or just reproducing familiar patterns from training? In our new paper, @pettertornberg.com and I take a closer look at recent claims of emergent conventions in AI and offer a different perspective... 🧵

Late-1800s titles in American Journal of Sociology, including “The Hierarchy of European Races” and “Old and New Aspects of the Aryan Question”

1909 issue of American Journal of Sociology with titles: “Some Questions Concerning the Higher Education of Women,” “How Does the Access of Women to Industrial Occupations React on the Family?,” “Is the Freer Granting of Divorce an Evil?,” “How Far Should Members of the Family Be Individualized?,” and “How Far Should Family Wealth Be Encouraged and Conserved?”

When they tell you academia is a woke bubble just remember where we came from

A banner advert for the University of Warwick, which says "Beyond ignores curiousity". This is a spelling error.

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere.

But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

🚀 New postdoc position for Platform Data & Computational Social Science
Join us to drive @gesis.org' efforts around the Digital Services Act (DSA) and conduct research with online platform data
💼 TV-L EG 14 | Location: Cologne
📌 Apply now: www.gesis.org/en/institute...
#DSA #CSS #DataScience

🎥 All keynote talks from IC²S² ‘25 are now available on our YouTube channel!
#ic2s2 #css

Sometimes, a descriptive figure is worth more than a thousand model coefficients: the importance of data description in social research Many social research questions aim at understanding relationships between different phenomena, and increasingly complex multivariate statistical models are often employed to address these questions...

Finally got this banger of a title out: 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠, 𝑎 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑔𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑎 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠.
If your descriptive figures and your model tell different stories, trust the figure. (And maybe rethink the model.)
👉 📄 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐

👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

Quite a strong final statement: "Descriptive research is important and it is a pity that the general obsession with causal estimates disincentivizes researchers from attempting to publish careful and detailed description."

Hendrik Erz PhD Student at the IAS, Linköping University (Sweden)

+++ ANNOUNCEMENT +++

I'm currently on the job market, looking for Postdoc opportunities (end of 2025/early 2026).

If you are — or know someone who is — in need of a political sociologist/computational social scientist, please get in touch or share my CV!

More info: www.hendrik-erz.de

„KI verändert schon jetzt, wie wir denken"

Ein Experiment mit jungen Forschern an der Universität Mannheim zeigt, wie tiefgreifend ChatGPT & Co das wissenschaftliche Schreiben verändern – und dass das noch längst nicht alles ist.

Im Wiarda-Blog: www.jmwiarda.de/blog/2025/06...

🧠🚀 What happens when early-career social scientists use ChatGPT for academic writing? Clearer and more coherent text - but no boost to depth, originality, rigour, or literature use, according to our field experiment.
📄👇

Call for papers: Generative AI and Social Science Research

journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

Thanks for the shoutout!
Our review of 69 experimental studies on disability discrimination in hiring shows:
✳️ Big gaps in callback rates
✳️ Some conditions get all the attention
✳️ We need more theory + intersectionality

Congratulations again 🥳

Norrköping campus at sunset

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science
📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden
⏰Deadline June 3
🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854
Please apply // help us spread the word