Stefan Pfattheicher

Just had a similar experience at Scientific Reports. We will submit to Meta Psychology, great outlet! open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

Positive and negative self-esteem are two (or one?) such offenders that I cover in my blog post.

www.the100.ci/2023/06/13/d...

Scientific Reports is the new Frontiers, from my experience. Low quality control, high publication fees, they have a deadline for reviewers of 10 days.

Many people, unfortunately, also just don't know how bad it is (one of my colleagues had no clue; now she has and she is angry).

This is a chance for behavioral science. Moving away from weak online studies, weak experimental manipulations, and moving to studying real behavior in real life. Remember the 60s? Social psychology was real. Asch, Milgram, et al.

Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life.

A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need.

Fascinating!

Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate.

Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains.

Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Mapping the online manipulation economy A market perspective on digital manipulation may help improve online trust and safety

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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?