Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model
In poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories contend that they avoid risk out of caution. Others that they take risks (e.g. crime) out of desperation.
In our new paper in BBS, we show that they are the two sides of the same coin: the desperation threshold.
Peer commentary call soon!
23.02.2026 19:53 — 👍 18 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 0
Slavery and forced labor have become less common over the last 250 years.
Line chart of the number of countries that had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor.
In 1789, 165 of the 174 countries covered had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor. In 2024, it was 9 countries.
Annotations on important cases, such as China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, say more about the history of slavery and forced labor.
✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view
For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different.
23.02.2026 12:00 — 👍 35 🔁 19 💬 3 📌 1
European politics has an interesting geographical pattern (as measured by the affiliation of the prime minister or president).
The interior is conservative, while the west coast has centrist and left-wing leaders.
www.update.news/i/188900711/...
23.02.2026 14:26 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Qualtrics is getting too expensive and our institute is considering switching to another survey software.
What can you recommend?
Needs to be user friendly, have reasonable support, handle similar features to Qualtrics, and be cheaper.
21.02.2026 09:52 — 👍 57 🔁 10 💬 19 📌 1
Reading about the Icelandic Constitutional Council, which had some...issues with working class representation
21.02.2026 09:50 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.
1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'
Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵
20.02.2026 22:20 — 👍 31 🔁 9 💬 3 📌 0
If you were to create a philosophy of LLM course, what kinds of things would you cover?
My thoughts in thread, but eager to hear what others would do
19.02.2026 17:29 — 👍 49 🔁 12 💬 23 📌 6
Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...
20.02.2026 09:17 — 👍 141 🔁 57 💬 4 📌 8
With all due respect to the authors (the study raises a “potential” concern), but its framing overstates that concern imo. A few things worth flagging before everyone panics 1/
19.02.2026 21:31 — 👍 30 🔁 9 💬 3 📌 1
The stages of online samples in my research career:
1. too difficult/expensive/unrepresentative
2. too expensive but representative
3. pretty affordable but less representative
4. cheap and full of bots with garbage responses
5. wide price range and maybe full of non-people pretending to be people
19.02.2026 20:36 — 👍 39 🔁 15 💬 1 📌 0
What is Open Science? 💡 Episode 59 is out now, where Lisanne de Moor spoke with @simine.com about the history, development, and future of Open Science in the field of personality psychology. Check it out!
18.02.2026 23:54 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
a woman is standing in front of a blue wrapped present and says hey i got you a present
ALT: a woman is standing in front of a blue wrapped present and says hey i got you a present
Je viens de découvrir un tableau exhaustive « Relevé des sanctions disciplinaires prononcées » par le CNRS par année. On peut voir un peu l'échelle des peines :
Par exemple : cadeau d'un ouvrage de dessins à caractère érotique => avertissement
19.02.2026 15:43 — 👍 20 🔁 10 💬 8 📌 0
Team "Elsevier Highlights Subversion" strikes again! Best one yet!
@deankarlan.bsky.social, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, @christopher-udry.bsky.social
18.02.2026 21:48 — 👍 37 🔁 16 💬 1 📌 0
”Most of the applications of clustering are not well thought out, not even considering whether observation clustering aligns with clinical goals.”
YES.
Clustering has become a huge fad in psychology as well, I see it everywhere.
18.02.2026 17:52 — 👍 49 🔁 13 💬 6 📌 1
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic.
text:
The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources
Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
18.02.2026 01:05 — 👍 139 🔁 45 💬 2 📌 0
yeah it's one thing to go making things up like philosophy, but its another to go *looking* for the made up stuff
that's another level
18.02.2026 07:26 — 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
poor bee GOLD_07, whose embarrassing mistake has been immortalised in a way beyond his comprehension
17.02.2026 21:19 — 👍 29 🔁 10 💬 2 📌 0
« "Nous avons comptabilisé 57 morts, dont 52 attribués à l'ultradroite et 5 à l'ultragauche de 1986 à 2021", relève Xavier Crettiez. "La violence politique est aujourd'hui très faible. Le dernier événement comparable à la mort de Quentin, c'est celle de Clément Méric en 2013" » tinyurl.com/576ef3w7
17.02.2026 07:56 — 👍 159 🔁 148 💬 4 📌 13
Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/
17.02.2026 07:13 — 👍 595 🔁 227 💬 21 📌 34
An LLM-backed "socratic tutor" to replace reading responses
Blog about fatherhood, langauge, developmental psychology, and cognitive science.
New blogpost about a teaching experiment I'm doing this quarter: a "socratic tutor" bot to help students gain understanding of specific reading assignments.
babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-l...
16.02.2026 19:23 — 👍 27 🔁 9 💬 2 📌 0
Looking forward to work with @fierycushman.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social on the moral psychology of authority!
16.02.2026 17:24 — 👍 52 🔁 4 💬 8 📌 0
The motherhood penalty isn’t as large as we think
And event-study designs aren’t the be-all end-all to empirical economics
On why the motherhood penalty may be overestimated. Simply put: The identifying variation comes from women having kids at different points in time, which might not be a valid counterfactual. open.substack.com/pub/plausibl...
15.02.2026 16:21 — 👍 36 🔁 4 💬 5 📌 2
Just an aside: 41 of the 100 meta analyses published in Psych Bull between 2023 and 2025 do not include *any* quality screening of identified studies. To the degree that those literatures include bad studies, they are being laundered together with the good ones.
14.02.2026 11:15 — 👍 29 🔁 6 💬 4 📌 1
How to live a meaningful life, according to science
The meaning of life has puzzled philosophers for millennia, but new research suggests it could be as simple as lending a helping hand
What is the meaning of life? 🧪
Some will say "There is none!" But the question has niggled people at least since the The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4000 years ago.
It seems having a positive impact on others is key to feeling your life has meaning. www.newscientist.com/article/2513...
03.02.2026 19:39 — 👍 15 🔁 5 💬 3 📌 0
Sport and Exercise Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany
Lecturer at the University of Sussex. Researching #StatsEd & psychometrics. Founder/Director of @rosenetwork.bsky.social. She/her. ADHD. hEDS. First Gen. 🤘
Assistant prof. at WashU enthusiastically researching social interactions, well-being, and morality. Vegan effective altruist, Brazilian Zouk addict, opera singer, climber. 🔜🇳🇿🥝
I study how people solve big problems with small brains. Starting at Dartmouth in 2026—I'm recruiting!
https://fredcallaway.com
comparative politics, European Union governance, research methods and design, data visualization, bureaucracy and public administration
Postdoc at LMU Munich | PhD in Psychology | Meta-science & Agent-based modelling
Academic researcher working on cancer, viruses, and meta-research in the life sciences. Opinions are my own.
Methodologist/Epidemiologist
London - UK
(Palaeo)[ecologist | limnologist] & #fakeStatistican, #rstats user, wielder of #GAMs. He/him/his. Opinions mine…
Tenured researcher at the University of Cologne, formerly Postdoc at the University of Amsterdam. Interested in Bayesian statistics, mathematical models of learning/memory, and computational reproducibility. I develop R packages and obsess about coffee
I am here for all interesting and funny posts on the social sciences, broadly understood and including open science and meta science, academia, teaching and research. https://linktr.ee/ingorohlfing
educational researcher focusing on academic talent (identification and development) and open science research practices (implementation and assessment). Now in Canada @UCalgary
Professor of Business Ethics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen, Norway. Research interests include business ethics, development economics, political economy.
PhD student of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
33 yo, computational cognitive science 🇩🇰 🇫🇷 @AarhusUni_int
| music producer 📀X2 💿 X1 | also 🐶📸🧗
Biostatistician @IDEXX formerly at harvardmed, @BIDMChealth, @nasa. Big data, clinical trials, and medical diagnostics. Mainer. Opinions are my own. he/him
M. Sc. psychologist, PhD student (she/her)
interested in meta science, psychological research methods, measurement, open science, #rstats
Here to share The Transparent and Open Science Game: https://osf.io/t9ngd/
boredom | empathy | pro- and antisocial behavior and traits | pasta | Aarhus University
Evolutionary biologist. Assistant Professor CCLCM/CWRU.
The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution (OUP 2021) and The Paradox of the Organism (HUP 2025).
www.arvidagren.com
Is watching you.
Political sociology x Computational social sciences @CrestSociology | @Polytechnique | @CNRS