Hu Chuan-Peng

I am shocked that researchers who conduct meta-analysis have to writing email, sending questionnaires, or even mails to the original authors to figure out whether the original study are real RCTs or not 😱
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Check out this recent @nature.com paper reporting a field experiment on X. It shows X's algorithm boosts conservative content and downranks traditional media—shifting users’ views on key issues. Switching to chronological doesn’t reverse the effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do You Agree? Do You Strongly Agree? The Effect of the Number of Response Categories on Response Processes and Verification of Substantive Hypotheses Abstract. This study investigates how the number and labeling of response categories in survey scales affect respondent behavior, psychometric properties,

This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...

Exploring the Role of the Rich Club in Network Control of Neurocognitive States Using a network control theoretical framework, we found that the brain's rich club does not optimally control dynamics of the brain. Instead, size-matched sets of random peripheral regions had a sign...

Exploring the Role of the Rich Club in Network Control of Neurocognitive States
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...

Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry?

New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com.

Thread tomorrow.

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

The lesion-network mappers reply

🍿

Great new paper in The Review of Economic Studies using randomized incentives to detect non-response bias, using administrative data to provide ground truth for comparison. While incentives increased participation, they didn't reliably reduce NR bias

academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Replication Research (R2) Replication Research (R2): A new interdisciplinary journal for replication research.

With #LoveReplicationsWeek just around the corner, let's talk about the new journal in the field: Replication Research (R2)

It's aligned with the values of #OpenScience, multidisciplinary and ready for your submissions!

digiresacademy.kit.com/posts/replic...

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

A PhD student would like to work on a fear/threat conditioning paradigm, using mild shocks as the US, to manipulate arousal. Are there any good open resources implementing a solid paradigm? 10 simple rules? etc?

My effort to reproduce this paper began as part of the Institute for Replication’s ongoing project to systematically examine the reproducibility and robustness of papers in Nature Human Behaviour3; my participation in this endeavour was approved by the Ethical Review Board of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s School of Business and Economics. Inspecting the paper’s first two figures revealed a mathematical impossibility. There are nine EU countries that experienced zero terror attacks during the study’s time frame. However, the paper reports that the inverse hyperbolic sine of these countries’ per capita attack rates are positive, and increase or decrease over time. This is impossible; the inverse hyperbolic sine of zero is zero4. The main outcome variable displayed in the paper’s second figure is hard-coded in the replication data as ‘DVSin’. Figure 1’s top row of plots shows that DVSin is negatively correlated with both terrorist attack rates (r = −0.107, two-sided P = 0.024) and their inverse hyperbolic sine (r = −0.108, two-sided P = 0.022). These plots also show that in the 305/420 country-year observations after 2006 experiencing zero terror attacks (72.6%), DVSin takes on 292 different positive values. This implies that the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper.

"the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper."

Retraction of 2023 paper that did not use the reported variables. The replication report is astonishing www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pre-publication peer review remains undefeated in laundering bullshit

There seem to be a whole (older) cohort of eminent social psychologists who essentially do not understand the concept of sampling error, and I wonder to what extent that lack of understanding was an adaptive trait for a career.

The imperiled peer review system
@carlbergstrom.com @plosbiology.org
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... open-access

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

⏰ REMINDER: Applications for AREN's Local Network Leads program are open through March 16.

This program trains researchers & research professionals in #Africa to become #openscience leaders who can establish a community of practice at their institution.

Learn more & apply:

having the same thought recently

Archiving research data Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 7, Part 11

Archiving research data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/archiving-... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

ChatGPT Health performance in a structured test of triage recommendations - Nature Medicine A stress test of ChatGPT Health triage revealed missed high-risk emergencies and inconsistent activation of suicide-crisis safeguards, raising safety concerns for consumer-scale deployment.

A new Nature Medicine study on ChatGPT Health isn't encouraging.

The system under-triaged 52% of emergencies, telling folks with DKA to wait 24-48 hours. It does fine on routine stuff, but fails at clinical extremes.
I'll take a deeper look 🧵
#MedSky #ChatGPTHealth

Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests - Nature Machine Intelligence Tangtartharakul and Storrs use standardized neuropsychological tests to compare human visual abilities with those of visual language models (VLMs). They report that while VLMs excel in high-level obje...

Our latest paper, “Visual language models show widespread visual deficits on neuropsychological tests”, is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Non-paywalled version:
arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786

Tweet thread below from first author @genetang.bsky.social...

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.

Alysa Liu's father shares conflicting emotions after Olympic gold | Exclusive Alysa Liu's father, Arthur Liu, shares conflicting emotions after his daughter won the Olympic gold medal in women's figure skating.

This @usatoday.com exclusive interview with Arthur Liu on his evolving relationship with Alysa is exceptional. I won't spoil it for you:

www.usatoday.com/story/sports...

https://sites.google.com/view/irca-conference-2026/home

📢We're thrilled to announce the first-ever #IRCA Conference on #Aphantasia!
Call for abstracts is open, deadline: 17 April 2026
sites.google.com/view/irca-co...
This 3-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consolidate current knowledge and draw a future plan for aphantasia research.

yep. see this piece by me & @lmesseri.bsky.social for a deep dive on this puzzle bsky.app/profile/mjcr...

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

RDM Weekly - Issue 033 A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.

Issue 33 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬

➡️ Intervention to Improve Students’ Knowledge of OS Practices @heeminkang.bsky.social and co-authors
➡️ Framework for Transparent and Responsible AI Use Mapped to the Research Process
➡️Making Qualitative Data Reusable
and more!
rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

If you're attending #SPSP, come check out the museum our department started! You can play around with behavioral science demos; eat free food; and maybe leave with some free swag. Register here: forms.gle/pTqBu5Pvaayn... @spspnews.bsky.social

Preregistration does not improve the transparent evaluation of severity in Popper’s philosophy of science or when deviations are allowed - Synthese One justification for preregistering research hypotheses, methods, and analyses is that it improves the transparent evaluation of the severity of hypothesis tests. In this article, I consider two cases in which preregistration does not improve this evaluation. First, I argue that, although preregistration may facilitate the transparent evaluation of severity in Mayo’s error statistical philosophy of science, it does not facilitate this evaluation in Popper’s theory-centric approach. To illustrate, I show that associated concerns about Type I error rate inflation are only relevant in the error statistical approach and not in a theory-centric approach. Second, I argue that a test procedure that is preregistered but that also allows deviations in its implementation (i.e., “a plan, not a prison”) does not provide a more transparent evaluation of Mayoian severity than a non-preregistered procedure. In particular, I argue that sample-based validity-enhancing deviations cause an unknown inflation of the test procedure’s Type I error rate and, consequently, an unknown reduction in its capability to license inferences severely. I conclude that preregistration does not improve the transparent evaluation of severity (a) in Popper’s philosophy of science or (b) in Mayo’s approach when deviations are allowed.

An #OpenAccess article in 'Synthese' examines whether preregistration improves the transparent evaluation of severity in hypothesis testing. bit.ly/3MMHbBM @markrubin.bsky.social #PhilSci

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford | The Segregation Tracking Project Use our visualizations to explore educational opportunity in your school & community.

VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here!

New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more!

edopportunity.org/segregation/

The Youth Mental Health Map: Integrating Machine Learning and Co-development to Produce a Brief, Reliable Self-Report Tool to Assess Transdiagnostic Dimensions of Youth Mental Health: https://osf.io/x5js4

If consensus on studying unconscious processing is the answer, what is the question?: https://osf.io/ubdmv