Stefan Pfattheicher

This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities Achal Agrawal is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.

Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🚨STOP, replication time!🚨
Does Feeling “Right” Make the Good More Good (and the Bad More Bad)?
Achar & Lee found that when people experience regulatory fit, moral predispositions get amplified—moral folks act more moral, less moral folks act less moral. Big, exciting claim!

Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Does “feeling right”—that is, experiencing regulatory fit—lead us to act more in line with our moral preferences?

With @schildchristoph.bsky.social and @stepf.bsky.social, we conducted a series of the first large-scale, independent close replications in the field of regulatory fit.

chart of child mortality in history, roughly 48% for all societies across the globe…until the 20th century, where it plummets to 4%

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

Screenshot of SNL's George Washington sketch from 10/28/23 with Nate Bargatze

"We will call the 12th month of the year 'December'... which means 'tenth month.'"

Sharp analysis on why 'Why $100,000 Is the New Poor'
www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨
Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

At ZPID we are searching for a tenure track assistant professor for Psychological Metascience in joint appointment with @unitrier.bsky.social preferably someone who has conducted quantitative research in metascience in psychology or related disciplines. Questions? Feel free to contact me personally.

What a great idea!! Maybe I'll do the same here.

Doing descriptive work (rather than confirmatory) in the real world with real people in real and rich social situations.

Among mine was Tankstellenwärter. Haven't tried it though.

A consulting company here does growth mindset interventions in business here 🤦

dacking

From the paper "How is it that a seemingly meaningless scale can pass standard validity tests?"

I think it's not a spurious finding. I’m a bit skeptical about calling it a “seemingly meaningless scale”. People are sense-making machines, even odd items get meaning. As they show, the scale reflects relationship satisfaction. The Saturn item is actually measuring something.

The only positive news about this paper is that this development may incentive social scientist to go out and talk to people again

Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!!

Goodness gracious.

In our rejoinder, we argue 1) Dark terminology isn't used responsibly as BL et al. claim, 2) the term can be replaced with a more sensible and scientific one, 3) data support our position (Stanton et al., 2025), and 4) popularity ≠ importance. @davidchester.bsky.social @drlynam.bsky.social

Top economists call on world leaders to set up an international panel on inequality Hundreds of top economists and other experts including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are calling for the world to set up an independent international panel on income and wealth inequalit...

Proud to have signed letter from 600+ economists & inequality experts from 70 countries supporting the call for a new Independent Panel on Inequality- an Inequality IPCC- to tackle the inequality emergency- G20 leaders must support this. #G20SouthAfrica
www.independent.co.uk/news/south-a...

I said that this week to my students, we should talk more about food and movies. This unites us.

Did you by chance measure state boredom?

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

screenshot from the paper, stating that no causal claims (like they did in the title) should be made.

paper title

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title.

If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing.

I can tell you what I think of that for free.

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

📊 now in English @fesonline.bsky.social:
Gender gap in voting behavior in Germany📊

It's about the “big picture” since 1953 & current trends 2021-2025.

The gender gap keeps growing, especially among the young.

-> Longer trends are continuing & partly accelerating.

library.fes.de/pdf-files/a-...

This is so cool!
Might also be related to why 'social class' is less used as a category (also in DEI meetings). It's less visible and reliability is low, so the meta-contrast becomes messy and not a good source of information, so we don't use it - although it's an important proxy for so many things!

Sechsminütiger VAR-Check und zweimal Gelb-Rot: Schlager erklärt sich Beim Kölner Sieg über den HSV stand auch Schiedsrichter Daniel Schlager immer wieder im Fokus - und nach Abpfiff aufgrund von drei Szenen auch in der Kritik. Der 35-Jährige äußerte sich ebenfalls und ...

Das ist doch Quatsch. Wenn dir ein Spieler permanent das Ohr abkaut und er keine Grenzen kennt, dann bekommt er irgendwann gelb. Auch in der 83. Minute. Versetzt euch mal in den Schiri rein der permanent angelabert wird von nem Spieler. Irgendwann ist halt mal Schluss.
www.kicker.de/sechsminueti...

A joke scientific paper with the title "Over 90% of children diagnosed with autism consumed breast milk and/or formula mileL a comprehensive cross-sectional analysis of the obvious"

Who did this?!

We read the (in)famous Bem Feeling the Future JPSP paper for a "spooky" Halloween lab meeting and it was fabulous!! I couldn't get over the wild methodological issue where they type of psychic power he founded depended on what random number generator Bem used 😂

Now out in Party Politics 🎉

Our study (@jbpilet.bsky.social)suggests that when a mainstream right-wing party signals willingness to rule with the radical right, support for the radical right rises — while the mainstream gains nothing.
👉 A legitimisation effect.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....