Jeff Lees

Race science in mainstream psychology, 1960–2010 Abstract. Anthropologists and human geneticists have long rejected efforts to purportedly scientifically justify racial inequality and colonialism. But race science has persisted, at least on the marg...

Finally officially published! "Race science in mainstream psychology, 1960–2010" with @rhacodactylus.bsky.social (who needs a job btw) direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... 🧵

#histsci #sts #philsci #metascience

Opinion | What 20 Years of Listening to Vaccine-Hesitant Parents Has Taught Me

“research suggests that this approach to vaccines is entirely logical in a culture that insists that health is the result of hard work and informed consumer decisions and too often sees illness as a personal failure.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...

I'm sure that if we scientists remain "apolitical" that this campaign of scientific censorship will stop, right...right?

And to me this is another instance of incredibly credulous actors within the legacy media ecosystem regurgitating insincere conservative propaganda as a "serious concern by serious people" until the moral panic has a life of its own

2/2

I'm generally averse to left-wing hypocracy-porn

But in this instance, I don't think the takeaway is that radical centrists are hypocrites on free speech

The lesson is instead that the moral panic over "left-wing cancel culture" is and always was a reactionary propaganda campaign

1/2

What is happening at public universities in Red states will not stop at public universities in Red states. The Authoritarians want speech codes, blacklists, and loyalty oaths for all in academia.

Texas A&M President to Step Down After Controversy Over ‘Gender Ideology’

So, a university president fired a professor because they taught a course that discussed there being more than two genders, and now the university president is being fired for not having fired the professor quickly enough, is where we're at. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

Living in Europe, the one thing I find difficult to convey to Europeans is just how completely incompetent and feckless the Democratic Party Leadership is at doing politics.

Job Offer: Postdoctoral Researcher in Disinformation As part of the strategic plan linked to the María de Maeztu Seal of Excellence award, the CIMCYC is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher with experience in the field of the psychology of disinformatio...

We are offering a 2-year postdoctoral position at CIMCyC (Granada, Spain) to work on the psychology of dis(mis)information.

Apply before 26th September. Nice city, great environment ☺️

Please share! 🔃

cimcyc.ugr.es/en/informati...

#socialpsychology
#cogpsyc
#PsychSciSky
#PsychJob
#PhDJob

*nodding and pointing upward sagely*

Maybe it's time the media put to rest the decade-long moral panic over "left-wing cancel culture" and start seeing f*cking reality for what it is?

The AAUP notes with great alarm the rash of recent administrative actions to discipline faculty, staff, and student speech in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. We write to remind leaders of colleges and universities of their fundamental duty to protect academic freedom and the absolute necessity to ensure that the freedom to discuss topics of public import without constraint is not curtailed under political pressure. As established in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, faculty are entitled to hearings under longstanding principles before they may be subject to discipline. At a moment when higher education is threatened by forces that seek to destroy it and its role in a democratic society, the anticipatory obedience shown by this rush to judgment must be avoided. Publication date September 15, 2025

From the @aaup.org:

www.aaup.org/news/academi...

Is this the "left-wing cancel culture" we've heard so much about?

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

It's *almost* as if Kennedy personally profits from people who don't trust real medicine and science and instead get sucked into the scam-filled world of "alternative" medicines

The man is a professional con-artists in an administration run by professional con-artists

Looking for help from #psychology and #survey folks who study #politics and use Prolific to collect data

What is the maximum for # of GOP participants one can plausibly get? According to the prescreen there's 10-12k GOP/leaners, but of course what's realistic for uptake is much lower.

Thank you!

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

More state-backed speech codes from the "DEI is destroying academic freedom" crowd 🖕

Extremely proud of this very thorough and informative Handbook for conducting both Replications and Reproductions!

What an amazing team of experts and so much insight into one place!

Go @forrt.bsky.social , go 🚀

Umberto Eco's 8th property of fascism: the enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak.

Six Fallacies in Substituting Large Language Models for Human Participants - Zhicheng Lin, 2025 Can artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, such as large language models (LLMs), replace human participants in behavioral and psychological research? Here, I cri...

Paper on the problems of using LLMs as replacements for human participants
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Maybe some in the "hard" sciences should read a little more "soft" science and history to learn that trying to appease authoritarians will not save them

Also, f*ck you if you'd so easily throw your colleagues to the wolves just to protect your little academic fiefdom 🖕🖕🖕

#solidarity

Screenshot of title page. "The Long-Run Effects of Colleges on Civic and Political Life" by Michael J. Andrews, William Marble, and Lauren Russell. Abstract: Social theorists and education advocates have long argued for the civic benefits of education. As large, durable institutions, universities are especially likely to affect the civic life of their communities. We investigate how the establishment of a university alters the civic and political trajectory of the surrounding area. For identification, we leverage historical site selection processes in which multiple locations were considered for new colleges. We bring together data on social capital, political preferences, and elections to assess the long-run impacts of college establishment. Communities with colleges exhibit higher levels of civic engagement and greater social trust today, relative to “runner-up” locations without colleges. These counties are also more politically liberal — a gap that has grown substantially since 2000. Our findings suggest understanding universities as place-based policies that shape the long-run civic and political development of their communities. They also shed light on current political battles over higher education policy.

Universities often serve as "anchor institutions" that deeply affect the character of their communities. In a new paper, we estimate how (and when) the establishment of a college influences local political and civic life. 🧵

osf.io/preprints/so...

Columbia Struck a Deal to Save Research Funding. How Do Its Researchers Feel About That? Faculty and others expressed a mixture of relief and frustration over the deal, under which the university will pay over $200 million to have most of its research funding restored.

I said what I said: "Professors are considering leaving Columbia because of the settlement, said Jacoby and Dixon-Román. 'It’s very demoralizing to teach in a university that’s, from my perspective, acceding to authoritarian demands,' Jacoby said."

www.chronicle.com/article/colu...

Columbia disciplines 70 students for protest as school pleads with Trump for funding The disciplinary actions come as the university tries to access about $1 billion in frozen grants, officials said.

A friendly reminder that the leadership of Columbia University are traitors to everything that academic freedom stands for

Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication As Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the ‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom

Is this the "left-wing cancel culture" we keep hearing about on college campuses?

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

a man is dancing in a living room while wearing a red sweater . ALT: a man is dancing in a living room while wearing a red sweater .

Waking up on a Monday morning to a minor revision

Yo! I'm looking for examples of good political science articles that theoretically or engage with space/context/place.

Can you help me out?

Why the federal government is making climate data disappear Under Trump, climate denial has given way to something even more dangerous: climate erasure.

Spoke to @katieyoder.bsky.social about the very disturbing development of the Trump administration disappearing climate reports and data, taking climate denial to an unseen level grist.org/language/tru...