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Aurélien Allard

@aurelienallard.bsky.social

Philosopher and Social Psychologist. Assistant professor at Nantes University. Studying justice, morality, replicability and open science. Personal website: https://aurelienallard.netlify.app/

582 Followers  |  386 Following  |  48 Posts  |  Joined: 30.08.2023  |  2.182

Latest posts by aurelienallard.bsky.social on Bluesky

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Did humans evolve to 'protect' women? Ethnography complicates a convenient narrative

Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that "humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women." This excellent (albeit at times gruesome) post makes the point that the ethnographic evidence does not really support this narrative.

07.10.2025 07:28 — 👍 89    🔁 14    💬 5    📌 2

RCTs work for medical research (if your sample composition is good enough, big "if") because by randomizing the individuals you are randomizing many contexts. But in behavioral and social science research the context is much broader than "your body" so its generalizability is always in question.

05.10.2025 16:50 — 👍 3    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 0

All the arguments about fair labor and intellectual property seem to distract from the core message, which is in the last sentence:

"Psychology is meant to study humans, not statistical models."

04.10.2025 08:33 — 👍 26    🔁 3    💬 4    📌 0
It’s a JAX, JAX, JAX, JAX World | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

I didn't realize that JAX is taking over in the probabilistic programming space. Very fair (afaict) post from Bob Carpenter, one of the core Stan developers, on how that looks from the Stan side.

04.10.2025 00:51 — 👍 32    🔁 7    💬 1    📌 3

GDPR is a great example of the sort of regulation which (I) creates a bunch of effort for people who want to comply (ii) gets innocently over-zealously deployed (III) becomes deployed as an excuse for orgs not to do things they don't want to and (iv)is fairly easily disregarded by those who want to.

03.10.2025 21:29 — 👍 225    🔁 36    💬 19    📌 3
OSF

We already know that lagged effects in CLPMs are likely to be upwardly biased, but just how easy is it to find significant effects? Way too easy. I tested CLPMS in 100 randomly selected pairs of correlated variables and found significant effects in 98 of them. New preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

02.10.2025 13:27 — 👍 33    🔁 16    💬 4    📌 4
A two page spread of national geographic magazine with a story by Jane Goodall and her husband reporting on egg-breaking, tool-using Egyptian vultures.

A two page spread of national geographic magazine with a story by Jane Goodall and her husband reporting on egg-breaking, tool-using Egyptian vultures.

Jane Goodall was also the first to bring attention to wild tool-using vultures, which she spotted randomly one day while out driving. These birds use stones to break into ostrich eggs.

Be observant like Jane and who knows what you’ll see! 🧪🥚

01.10.2025 18:49 — 👍 90    🔁 20    💬 0    📌 0
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Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

01.10.2025 18:26 — 👍 854    🔁 278    💬 22    📌 69
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Our PCIRR Stage 2 Registered Report now officially accepted by Royal Society Open Science:

"Revisiting mental accounting classic paradigms: Replication Registered Report of the problems reviewed in Thaler (1999)"

Mengfei Li's remarkable UG RRR thesis.

Details 👇🧵

29.09.2025 12:30 — 👍 8    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 1

Psychophysics meets moral psych! In the best possible way!

I worry what this means for clinical research and patient reported outcomes, which often measure things like pain on a very simple 1-10 scale, often without clear anchoring.

Such important work by
@vladchituc.bsky.social!

29.09.2025 11:35 — 👍 11    🔁 5    💬 0    📌 0
#1 - Aristote et le Souverain Bien (Le Sens de la Vie)
YouTube video by Empeiria #1 - Aristote et le Souverain Bien (Le Sens de la Vie)

Les cours à l'université ont repris. J'ai mis en ligne les deux premières séances de mon cours d'introduction à la philosophie et son histoire sur le thème du "sens de la vie". La première séance est ici :
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoe...
mediaserver.unige.ch/play/280098

29.09.2025 11:47 — 👍 8    🔁 2    💬 2    📌 0
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Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

28.09.2025 21:44 — 👍 32    🔁 10    💬 1    📌 1

Unfortunately, many historical science anecdotes are probably false.

• Edward Jenner didn't deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine; and he wasn't the first to try using cowpox
• Pasteur didn't discover a chicken cholera vaccine accidentally

27.09.2025 22:39 — 👍 58    🔁 17    💬 2    📌 1
The topic of faith, religion and spirituality is also one where some societies notably differ. Outside of the U.S., religion is never one of the top 10 sources of meaning cited – and no more than 5% of any non-American public mention it. In the U.S., however, 15% mention religion or God as a source of meaning, making it the fifth most mentioned topic. For some, the emphasis on religion is about their personal relationship with Jesus: “I follow Jesus so my faith and hope is based on how he plays a role in my life. I don’t rely on any human to benefit my life.” Others note the benefits that come from being part of organized religion, such as camaraderie in a tough time: “My husband just died, so life is not very fulfilling right now. The support of family and friends, church, and his coworkers have helped me find meaning, as well as thinking about the good things we shared.” Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. are much more likely than mainline Protestants to mention faith as a source of meaning – 34% vs. 13%, respectively. Across all U.S. religious groups, those who attend religious services more often are much more likely to cite their religion in their answer than those who are less frequent attendees.

The topic of faith, religion and spirituality is also one where some societies notably differ. Outside of the U.S., religion is never one of the top 10 sources of meaning cited – and no more than 5% of any non-American public mention it. In the U.S., however, 15% mention religion or God as a source of meaning, making it the fifth most mentioned topic. For some, the emphasis on religion is about their personal relationship with Jesus: “I follow Jesus so my faith and hope is based on how he plays a role in my life. I don’t rely on any human to benefit my life.” Others note the benefits that come from being part of organized religion, such as camaraderie in a tough time: “My husband just died, so life is not very fulfilling right now. The support of family and friends, church, and his coworkers have helped me find meaning, as well as thinking about the good things we shared.” Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. are much more likely than mainline Protestants to mention faith as a source of meaning – 34% vs. 13%, respectively. Across all U.S. religious groups, those who attend religious services more often are much more likely to cite their religion in their answer than those who are less frequent attendees.

We asked people in 17 advanced economies what gives them meaning in life.

Americans were much more likely to mention religion as a source of meaning.
www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/...

27.09.2025 14:45 — 👍 74    🔁 27    💬 18    📌 12
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Incroyable tableau en arrivant dans ma salle de cours ce matin @normalesup.bsky.social 🤩

26.09.2025 06:51 — 👍 303    🔁 31    💬 12    📌 2

Simonsohn has now posted a blog response to our recent paper about the poor statistical properties of the P curve. @clintin.bsky.social and I are finishing up a less-technical paper that will serve as a response. But I wanted to address a meta-issue *around* this that may clarify some things. 1/x

25.09.2025 10:07 — 👍 72    🔁 29    💬 2    📌 6

Great comments! LLMs are also decrease hierarchies based on resources in some ways -- previously having an army of RAs code speeches would cost thousands of euros, now a savvy master student could do it for the cost of a lunch.

25.09.2025 09:28 — 👍 4    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 0
Screenshot of first page of slidecrafting-book.com website

Screenshot of first page of slidecrafting-book.com website

I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up

There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily

slidecrafting-book.com
#quarto

24.09.2025 16:12 — 👍 179    🔁 64    💬 11    📌 6
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Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

🧵

24.09.2025 08:54 — 👍 34    🔁 13    💬 1    📌 0

So a spurious correlation from an observational study is “gold standard science”, but testing vaccines in multiple RCTs with over 30,000 participants each is not?

23.09.2025 14:01 — 👍 86    🔁 13    💬 5    📌 0
Title: Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving
Authors: Kirstan Brodie, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman

Title: Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving Authors: Kirstan Brodie, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

22.09.2025 17:27 — 👍 22    🔁 11    💬 1    📌 1

TIL that the "Krebs" of Krebs and Davies was the son of "Krebs" of the Krebs cycle:

23.09.2025 01:53 — 👍 15    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
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Close Netflix and open this: probably the best modeling paper I've ever read

22.09.2025 18:38 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0
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Modest Advice for New Graduate Students Throughout the course of my years in graduate school, I kept a running list of the best advice given to me, and the strategies that helped…

Some very good advice for thriving in graduate school dorsaamir.medium.com/modest-advic...

22.09.2025 15:49 — 👍 2    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0
Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

💖This paper has been ~11 years in the making - and probably my favorite project of all time. Thrilled to see it in @pnas.org! I'm so lucky that Zach decided to do a second PhD and join my lab @psychillinois.bsky.social back in 2014 - a fabulous scientist & human being! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

22.09.2025 14:27 — 👍 40    🔁 9    💬 4    📌 1

I would argue this is actually about Bayesian inference

21.09.2025 00:35 — 👍 29    🔁 5    💬 1    📌 0

since I first heard about LLM "silicon samples," I've been baffled by the idea. even if a group of humans were able to predict the behavior or answers of others, no one would use it instead of real data, cause there would clearly be unknown biases and situations in which the predictions would fail.

19.09.2025 10:18 — 👍 4    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

Public appreciation post for @juliabottesini.com! The community doesn't know the great lengths Julia has gone to restabilize operations at PsyArXiv. We're all incredibly lucky to have her. Many, many hours and a great deal of thought/care have gone into the task. Thank you, Julia!

18.09.2025 19:20 — 👍 43    🔁 12    💬 1    📌 0

Then with a suitable maths background, standard stats texts become fairly easy to follow; I like Bruce Hansen's Econometrics for instance.

Sorry if this is too introductory for you (I don't know your maths level)

18.09.2025 10:55 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Analysis: Abbott's Understanding Analysis is amazingly clear

Linear Algebra: Nathaniel Johnston's two books are incredible, and take you from no knowledge of LA to a fairly advanced level

Probability Theory: for a first step, Hwang and Blitzstein is amazing (but you probably already know this one)

18.09.2025 10:52 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 2    📌 0

@aurelienallard is following 20 prominent accounts