Daniel Heck

1/3 I think the premise is worth some attention: why is there a (frequently wrong) expectation that science is precise? I am often confused even by textbooks for university student audiences. Confused about how frequently findings and expert judgements are portrayed as certain and final.

It would be good to learn already in school that uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of science.

I guess people generally dislike being in a cognitive state of uncertainty. But I vaguely remember some studies showing that scientists are better at coping with it.

Expert Judgment and Communication of Uncertainty Knowledge built through the scientific study of climate is essential for informed decision-making. In the presence of irreducible uncertainty, the results of climate science must be gathered and synth...

"Science is expected to be precise, and admissions of uncertainty (especially large levels) can be perceived as scientific failures, rather than natural limitations of knowledge of a topic." 😕

Broomell et al. (2025). Expert judgment and communication of uncertainty. doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Just submitted a minor bugfix of RRreg to CRAN:
github.com/danheck/RRre...

The R package focuses on analyzing univariate & multivariate data collected with the Randomized Response Technique (RRT), which protects anonymity in surveys by randomly scrambling responses.

I also added a new logo 🚀

What an incredible resource from the indefatigable @chrischirp.bsky.social . No one can say we didn't know -- it's all happening in broad daylight.

Ein ganz ganz wichtiger Text in diesen Zeiten. "Die vorliegende Kampagne gegen eine deutsche Top-Juristin ist nichts anderes als ein weiterer Versuch der Trumpisierung deutscher Politik. [...] es liegt kurzum an wirklich allen Demokraten, dies nicht zuzulassen." 👊

of course, we also need a new badge!

proper link: osf.io/preprints/os...

The effort by the authors is laudable and may be useful in itself.

But I am not sure where all the checklists will lead us...

Yet another checklist for science 🚀

✅A checklist...
✅for incentivizing...
✅and facilitating...
✅good theory building
✅https://osf.io/preprints/osf/7qvfz_v2

Luckily enough, we can nowadays use AI to fill out all the checklists during the research process 😅

Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution | PNAS Cultural evolution applies evolutionary concepts and tools to explain the change of culture over time. Despite advances in both theoretical and emp...

Here's a paper with a skeleton of the idea, but there is really lots of research to do on the structure of workflow networks, now to make them robust, how to development diagnostics and calculi for steps within them. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Simplifying ethics applications and their evaluation 👍

Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) provides a free webtool for ethics proposals in collaboration with #Chemnitz #University of #Technology
👉 ethiktool.org/en

Thank you @volkswagenstiftung.de
#ethic #psychology #humanities

Please read this article.

Once you see it, you can't not see it.

And it will make you a better consumer of the news and therefore a better and more informed citizen.

👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

Verantwortung der Leitung von Arbeitseinheiten - Wissenschaftliche Integrität Die Leitung einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeitseinheit trägt die Verantwortung für die gesamte Einheit. Das Zusammenwirken in wissenschaftlichen Arbeitseinheiten ist so beschaffen, dass die Gruppe als Ga...

#WissenschaftlicheIntegrität: Die Leitung einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeitseinheit trägt die #Verantwortung für die gesamte Einheit. Leitlinie 4 des #GWP Kodex beschäftigt sich mit Aufgaben, Rollen & Pflichten - auch in Bezug auf Karriereförderung oder Machtmissbrauch:
fcld.ly/rcy0aos

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes.

This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

Enhancing Intellectual Humility About Political Topics: An Intervention Tournament Including Five Conceptual Replications Intellectual humility, the recognition of one's intellectual limitations, is promising to make controversial political debates more constructive. However, it is unknown how to best enhance a person's...

Paper by @lknochelmann.bsky.social now published in the European Journal of Social Psychology 🥳

In an intervention tournament, we investigated how to best enhance a person’s intellectual humility.

--> doi.org/10.1002/ejsp...

Thanks for this overview!

A related issue regarding the mixed results is the ambiguity of fluency theories regarding the required boundary conditions:

If the manipulation is too salient, it is assumed that people can discount the effect; but if it is too weak, there might be no effect at all. 😕

Research on processing fluency used to be very popular with publications in Psychological Science, PNAS, etc. Now there are several prominent failed replications of fluency effects. A newest one: bsky.app/profile/dani... >

New paper by my PhD student @semihaktepe.bsky.social now published 🚀

"Revisiting the effect of discrepant perceptual fluency on truth judgments" tinyurl.com/2eepue5y

--> Two experiments & a meta-analysis indicate that high visual contrast does not lead to higher truth judgments.

Ever-rising height of car bonnets a ‘clear threat’ to children, report says High-fronted SUVs are more likely to kill and are on the rise in Europe, with the UK an extreme example

I cannot fathom why these monstrosities are allowed on our roads. Regulations relating to both frontal visibility (some SUVs literally have worse FV than a tank, increasing the likelihood of hitting someone) and bonnet height (increases the severity when someone is hit) seem a no-brainer to me.

🚀Postdoc position @unimarburg.bsky.social in the project:

"Bridging the Gap Between Verbal Psychological Theories & Formal Statistical Modeling with Large Language Models"
(funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de)

📅Start: 01.10.2025 | ⏳4 years
🔗 Apply now: uni-marburg.de/jhbCen
🔄 Thanks for sharing!

I'm still amazed how much of road danger is entirely explained by car speed

Great overview of benefits/drawbacks of LLMs for writing & coding👏

"Writing is hard because the process of getting something onto the page helps us figure out what we think—about a topic, a problem or an idea. If we turn to AI to do the writing, we’re not going to be doing the thinking either."

Psychological inoculation is a very popular intervention against online misinfo, but it hasn't been tested using real-world outcomes in realistic scenarios.

In a new paper just published in PNAS Nexus, this is what we did: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Short version: It didn't really work.

🚀 PhD Position in Psychological Methods at @unimarburg.bsky.social
📅 Start: 01.10.2025 | 💼 50% TV-H E13 | ⏳ 3 years

Focus on statistical modeling—Bayesian statistics, cognitive modeling, psychometrics.

🔗 Apply now: uni-marburg.de/r5dKTr

🔄 Thanks for sharing!

Thanks!

German job posting: uni-marburg.de/aUFIpw

🚀Postdoc position @unimarburg.bsky.social in the project:

"Bridging the Gap Between Verbal Psychological Theories & Formal Statistical Modeling with Large Language Models"
(funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de)

📅Start: 01.10.2025 | ⏳4 years
🔗 Apply now: uni-marburg.de/jhbCen
🔄 Thanks for sharing!

Congratulations to the four poster award winners 👏👏👏
Kayla Carter, Leona Hammelrath, Anna Jori Lücke, and @bsiepe.bsky.social 💐