Almog Simchon

Our paper is finally out in Cognition! 🎉
We introduce the "CLIP task"—a computerized paradigm for measuring numerical bias in adults: when number and physical size both matter, do you spontaneously rely more on numbers or on physical size?

If you're a psychologist working with text data in R, this package is for you.

This project wouldn’t have come together without the amazing team -- Tomer Zipori and @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social for the heavy lifting and computational analysis, @lewan.bsky.social for his insight, and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social whose vision made this possible. Truly grateful for this!

An opportunity to work with the best!

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

Our new #rstats embeddings tutorial is now published in Psychological Methods! Led by the one and only @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social

For my first BlueSky post I want to share this freshly published paper in PNAS @pnas.org!
We show how belief and disbelief shape narrative processing in the brain, not just as opposites of a continuum, but as distinct effects, including a cool truth/belief bias.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Public health suffers when those in power dismiss knowledge “Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. In today’s world, we frequently encounter a different variant of this philosophy, perhaps best de...

My latest column in Science went up yesterday doi.org/10.1126/scie... . I argue that “Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. 1/n

היה הכי כיף! תודה רבה על ההזמנה 😊

This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

Turns out @aroyehuns.bsky.social is here after all!

Only @lewan.bsky.social can distill four years of research into such an insightful 🧵. Proud to have co-authored these works and especially grateful to Segun Aroyehun for leading our latest paper. Collaborated with the fantastic team: @janalasser.bsky.social @fabiocarrella.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

1/6 Hello Bluesky! 👋 Excited to join this community and share my new blog. First post: Using Bayesian hierarchical models to rescue "unreliable" cognitive tasks, with the dot-probe task as my case study. cogpsychreserve.netlify.app/posts/dotpro...

We are delighted to invite applications for an open-rank, tenure-track position at the developmental psychology track within the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

For more information, follow the link:
bgu-academic-recruitment.my.site.com/Recruiters/V...

Free speech, fact checking, and the right to accurate information True to his campaign promises, on 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a broad range of Executive Orders, the scope of which ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” t...

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

Grateful to be a coauthor on this paper led by @fabiocarrella.bsky.social , and part of this terrific team

Steve has summarized more than four years of work into this thread. Interested in microtargeting? Check it out!

Our paper is finally out!

The image is the cover page of an article from the "Annual Review of Psychology" titled "Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science" by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig. It features a brief abstract, keywords, and publication details. The abstract outlines the concept of "boosting" as a behavioral public policy that emphasizes empowering individuals to make informed decisions, in contrast to "nudging," which subtly steers behavior. The abstract reads: Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people's agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches.

List with summary points: 1. Behavioral public policy garnered widespread attention with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. 2. Criticisms of nudging include that it does not promote agency and competences and that it relies—overly optimistically—on the presence of benevolent choice architects. 3. The proliferation of environments threatening people's autonomy, the slow pace of systemic approaches to tackling societal issues, and the intrinsic benefits of empowerment make empowering citizens an indispensable objective of behavioral public policy. 4. Boosting is a behavioral public policy approach to empowerment grounded in evidence from behavioral science that shows that humans’ boundedly rational decision making is not as flawed as the nudging approach assumes. 5. Boosts are interventions that improve people's competencies to make informed choices that conform to their goals, preferences, and desires. 6. In self-nudging boosts, people learn to use architectural changes in their proximate choice environment to regulate their own behavior—that is, they are empowered to adapt their own choice environments. 7. There are boosts to foster core competences in many domains, including finance, online environments, and health, as well as broader, overarching areas, such as motivation, risk, and judgment and decision making. Boosts should be part of a policy mix that also includes system-level approaches. 8. When implementing boosts, policy makers need to avoid the trap of individualizing responsibility and to be mindful that, due to differences in cognition and motivation, inequalities in the desirable effects across boosted individuals may emerge.

🌟🧠💪📝
#BOOSTING: Empowering citizens with behavioral science

New, freely available paper in Annual Review of Psychology.
PDF: tinyurl.com/boosting2025

For more: scienceofboosting.org

@arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social

@annualreviews.bsky.social
#policy #behavioralscience

1/ 🧵👇

✨ Excited to share our new preprint! ✨
After years of work in @nivreggev.bsky.social 's SCMB lab, we proudly present the Israeli Face Database (IFD)!
Special thanks to co-leader @mayanna.bsky.social, @talmoran.bsky.social, and everyone who made this possible. 🙌

🧵 A thread:

In this new article in American Psychologist we respond to critics in detail and clarify two key points for the field;

(1) The prevalence of misinformation in society is substantial when properly defined.

(2) Misinformation causally impacts attitudes and behaviors.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

can't say I disagree :(

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one for far too long. Outstanding work by @cabels18.bsky.social, @kiiahuttunen.bsky.social, @lewan.bsky.social and Ralph Hertwig.

Dedicated to my fellow Israelis, with a glimmer of hope that we might still manage to dodge that bullet

What an amazing project. So happy to see this finally out. Kudos Inon and team!

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for putting this together!

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for creating this list!

The book is still a work in progress, and if you spot errors or inaccuracies, please reach out!

It is designed to cover the very specific topics I'm teaching in my course at BGU, but it should be a pretty useful resource (I hope!) for students and researchers in social sciences who do text as data in R

Very excited to share a new textbook I am working on (led by Louis Teitelbaum). It's called Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language, and it covers text analysis and social media research w/ example code in R ds4psych.com #css #rstats

To state the obvious -- yes, black-box ML is awesome, LLMs are great, and we do not discourage anyone from using them (I use them all the time). But there is much to gain in transparency, interpretability, and accuracy when integrating theory into our prediction models ✌️