I wrote a blog for the Meta-Research Center expressing my infinite frustration about not getting data. What else is new, you might think? Well, I added an extra layer of annoyance directed at the journals who do NOTHING to enforce promised data sharing.
metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/2/...
Researchers often present participants with stimuli that are assumed to reliably and exclusively evoke one, and only one, emotion category. This study shows that this is rarely the case for some widely used stimuli.
doi.org/10.1037/emo0...
1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme...
haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...
It's a beautiful plot, but it's terribly misleading about the impact of pre-registration. More recent studies (with higher sample sizes) find very little impact of pre-registration on the publication of null results.
Here's a thread with some references (1/N)
Registered report (with 885 US MTurkers) finds no evidence for the claim that people with higher chronic loneliness have a stronger tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman objects @giladfeldman.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1037/cns0...
8.0% of citations in the medical literature contain major errors.
E.g., the cited work makes the opposite claim or is unrelated to the claim in the citing article.
Using randomly assigned identities, ppl were more likely to accept identity-congruent misinformation despite equal knowledge, supporting identity-protective motivated reasoning as a key driver of misinformation acceptance. #EvPsych #cogpsyc #SocialPsyc
#polipsy
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
New paper out:
Some people are systematically better at judging others’ intelligence.
Who are the best judges? People WHO are intelligent themselves, have good emotion-perception ability, and who are high in well-being.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I built a basic shiny app to check doi's (with help of LLM, Claude Opus). The use case is for when students submit work with fabricated references (I used to randomly check, this will systematically check). Note it comes with no warranties,... . tvpollet.github.io/2026-01-30-D...
Out now and open access for four weeks as the editor's choice Topic in Focus in American Psychologist.
Contrary to popular belief, evolutionary psychology hypotheses are testable and falsifiable.
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
📣Revised preprint by @cas-goos.bsky.social
Measurement reliability, validity, and reporting in psychology still has a long way to go...
We compared original studies w replications, and where possible recalculated reliability & unidimensionality.
Some findings >
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People think that non-human animals have thoughts and feelings, but not in the same way that humans do.
In a large sample of children & adolescents (n > 1k) from 15 countries, results looked very similar across countries and age groups.
doi.org/10.1016/j.je...
I hate this: "The Editors have retracted this article... the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) instrument was used without proper permissions" link.springer.com/article/10.1... The MMSE is a series of 11 simple questions. A perfectly good paper is retracted because you can copyright 11 questions
Large, cross-cultural study (n > 6k, 25 nations) on international prosociality finds that
- ingroup favoritism is widespread
- more similarities between two nations = more prosociality
- people from rich nations give more to people from poor nations
doi.org/10.1093/pnas...
"Children between the ages of 4 to 11 years traded off their moral concern for other species against the cultural importance of human food practices."
journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
Some people consistently restrict their prosociality to a narrow group of individuals, whereas others extend it to a wider range of groups.
Restricted prosociality was most strongly correlated with traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
doi.org/10.1037/pspp...
How many versions of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) exist? And how much does this affect research using the IGT? More than you might think. 🧵
The Iowa Gambling Task is an extreme example of Jingle Fallacy and schmeasurement.
In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99.
At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.
Whose job is it to solve climate change?
This study asked Dutch residents and political and business representatives and they mostly agreed on the answer. It's mostly the others' responsibility 🙃
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
Social media research has a conflict of interest problem:
“these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque”
A real concern is that this may incentivize scholars to minimize the harms of social media platforms
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11507
Images of familiar faces generated with Chat-GPT and DALLE are indistinguishable from real photographs
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🌟 Call for Session Proposals 🌟
Don’t miss your chance to shape the agenda for #SIPS2026!
Propose:
✨workshop,
✨hackathon,
✨unconference,
✨lightning talk,
✨roundtables.
Submission Deadlines:
🔹 In-Person (Washington, DC, USA): Jan 23, 2026
🔹 Online: Feb 27, 2026
Details:
Our machine learning competition on forecasting depression is online! We'd love for as many people as possible to participate. Please share in your respective networks — thank you :).
www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/announcement...
This NHB article that a I4R fellow reproduced is now retracted and a matters arising has been published. See this thread for more information: bsky.app/profile/jack...
Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: Dietvorst, B. J. (in press). Understanding people's preferences for predictions: People prioritize being right over minimizing how wrong they are in expectation. Management Science. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc...
Maybe a contender for the next round of the Ig Nobel?
People in Chicago noticed a hole in the pavement where a rat had fallen into the wet concrete.
Scientists summoned all their um, actually energy, ran some analyses, and showed that it was most likely a squirrel.
doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
Interesting megastudy on the (in)effectiveness of climate messaging: tiny effects on attitudes, no effects on donation www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"Persuasiveness varied little across party lines", another win for Persuasion in Parallel @aecoppock.bsky.social
AMPPS recently accepted a new paper "Registered Replication Report: Johns, Schmader, & Martens (2005)" on stereotype threat (osf.io/preprints/ps...); full paper is forthcoming on our website). AMPPS is now soliciting Commentary articles on this paper. @psychscience.bsky.social /cont
