Daniel Mirny

🚨New Paper🚨

Elected officials are increasingly extreme.

E.g., a recent analysis of 84,000 state-level candidates found that extreme candidates are now winning at the highest rates in 30 years.

Why are people increasingly drawn to extreme candidates?

Republicans and Democrats agree: They can’t agree on basic facts Nearly eight-in-ten Americans say that when it comes to important issues facing the country, most Republican and Democratic voters not only disagree over plans and policies, but also cannot agree on basic facts. Ironically, Republicans and Democrats do agree that partisan disagreements extend to the basic facts of issues, according to a new Pew Research Center survey

Republicans and Democrats agree: They can’t agree on basic facts
www.pewresearch.org/...

Source Memory Is More Accurate for Opinions than for Facts Abstract. Effective communication relies on consumers remembering, sharing, and applying relevant information. Source memory, the ability to link a claim t

The sixth HotFresh recommended paper is:

Mirny, D. J., & Spiller, S. A. (2025) Source memory is more accurate for opinions than for facts, Journal of Consumer Research.

academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share.

Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*.

I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind.

github.com/bretthollenb...

Fellow European researchers, if at all in your power, try to get your school to consider late applicants who were admitted to US programs.

Hearing from many cases of admitted to top US schools who last minute realize they won't be allowed in the country.

Demand for American degrees has already hit covid-era lows Trump’s war on universities could drive away America’s brightest import

America used to be the first choice for international students. Now the Trump administration is doing its best to push them away. It might succeed in hurting the Ivies, but it will hurt American innovation and competitiveness more

www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

This is awesome!

Hi all hi 👋 We’ve been working on a toolkit to help people integrate GPT-based chatbots into Qualtrics surveys—securely and with no coding experience needed.

Step-by-step guide:
🔗 lucidresearch.io/getting-star...
See it in action:
🔍 uky.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

How it works ↓

#qualtrics

💢New paper alert💢

Dishonesty is everywhere — but it’s not all the same. My new solo-authored paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General disentangles cheating and lying as distinct forms of dishonesty.

Link to paper: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

A thread 🧵👇

A new and fresh paper calls for a fresh start on a new platform. Hi y'all! 👋

Check out my paper with @spillersas.bsky.social and @krajbichlab.bsky.social - we look at the multi-faceted role of attention in opportunity cost neglect, using eye-tracking + computational modeling. Read more at the link!

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.

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org

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

Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

Truly beautiful paper from @kevintobia.bsky.social et al. on how people ordinarily understand the concept of the reasonable person

Key claim: There is a core folk notion of the reasonable that is widely shared across cultures

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Really proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social.

We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…

In other words, we find that people are more likely to misattribute facts (to incorrect sources) than they are to misattribute opinions… so next time you’re scratching your head, struggling to remember where a claim came from (as I so often am) it may be the claim itself that is to blame 😉

Encoding processes are important. Faced with new information, we encode associative links between sources and claims. As opinions tend to provide more information about a source than facts do, the encoded associative links are stronger, helping us to later recall who it was that said a given claim.

In such a noisy world, it can be difficult to remember who said what. In a new paper at @jcrnews.bsky.social, @spillersas.bsky.social and I find that source memory - the attribution of claims to their original sources - is more accurate for opinions than for facts.

academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...