Devinder Khera

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

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Is social interaction a tradeoff of autonomy for belonging compared to being alone? New paper by phenom @elainehoan.bsky.social says yes if you're interacting with strangers, no if you're interacting with friends/family. With a romantic partner you gain in both. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Common method bias can lead to spurious correlations in relationship studies Nature Reviews Psychology - Common method bias can lead to spurious correlations in relationship studies

Nice coverage of our Pseudo project in Nature Reviews. @johnsakaluk.bsky.social @davekhera.bsky.social @helenaqin.bsky.social @sarahcestanton.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Silly Jimmy Kimmel. He should have just called for all homeless people to be killed and he’d still have a job.

Is the idea that getting into a romantic relationship increases well-being a myth? A new MacLab paper says no. And I had so much to say about this work, I started a Substack: The Unromantic. Links for the paper and the Substack in replies.

ggplot2 4.0.0 A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

I'd feel more confident with the wet bandits.

For potential grad students: if you're interested in this kind of work on assessing and improving close relationships measures, our group just got a grant to do five more years of it. Join our team!

Our preprint for #dyadic SEM tutorial with {dySEM} is back up/available!

Thanks to @psyarxivbot.bsky.social team quickly retooling their approach (and the thankless work of the mods) to help sift the real from the slop!

Excellent paper alert!!!

I’ve watched Sam give two talks about this topic (once as a first year grad student which was extremely formative for my research trajectory). Very excited to see this in print!

Despite the unclear meaning of the items, many participants tried to rate them by drawing on information about their own romantic relationships. A total of 88.89% of participants referenced their own relationships in response to at least one item, and many of these responses (41.46%) drew on global, usually positive feelings about the relationship. For example, when asked to justify a rating to the snowdrop item, a participant wrote, “I love the person I am in a relationship with. 7 was the highest number I could choose to indicate how much I love them.” In response to the umbra item, another wrote, “I wasn’t sure what umbra meant. But I appreciate everything that comes with my relationship, so I clicked ‘agree.’”

Helena's qualitative work for this was so amazing. Participants summed up sentiment override and their use of global evaluations for us really nicely.

This is schmeasurement's Dead Salmon fMRI study:

A cautionary tale of how standard research practices can produce misleading results.

I love it. Immediately putting it on my reading lists.

It's out!!🌶️🔥

Shoutout to my talented coauthors @johnsakaluk.bsky.social, James Kim, @davekhera.bsky.social, Helena Qin and @sarahcestanton.bsky.social.

When considering the moving to UWO, the opportunity to have Sam as a colleague in SPDP, and work with her, was a huge draw. And I'll never forget how agitated her award-winning address--where she first laid these ideas out--left the audience. Incredibly proud to see this work out and play a role.

From this paper:

(Holy Cow! Reminds me also of how Bullshit Receptivity items can glom together!)

🚨 YA’LL!! HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS PAPER TO COME OUT FOR AGES. IT IS SO SATURN.

I MEAN, IT IS SO GOOD.

SAME THING.

(JUST READ IT)

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025 Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor ALT: a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor

I'll be recruiting a grad student to join the UNICORN lab for Fall 2026! If you know any magical students interested in gender/sex, LGBTQ+ issues, intergroup relations, stereotyping & prejudice, social cognition, feminism, issues of bodily autonomy, or anything else I do, please send them my way!

The Love Consortium Statistics Decision Tree launched today! Think of it like a choose-your-own adventure guide to help you identify the best analyses for your specific dataset and research question.

theloveconsortium.org/so/9fPWyVE6Z...

#DataScience #Statistics

🧵
Very excited (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social) to share our preprint tutorial for using our R 📦 dySEM for #dyadic data analysis with latent variables, in cross-sectional data sets.

This paper has been literal years in the making, and provides three distinct tutorials.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

New MacLab paper. Do people partner up to save on rent? Apparently not.

This is amazing news!! Congrats 💐.

Archives of Sexual Behavior The official publication of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), Archives of Sexual Behavior publishes scientific research on sex, gender, and ...

Excited to share that I will be the next Editor-in-Chief of Archives of Sexual Behavior.

See: link.springer.com/journal/1050...

Our paper is now out: Trust in Close Relationships Revisited. All the buzzwords: bifactor modelling, invariance testing, construct, and a few others. Joking aside, @omarjcamanto.bsky.social is a very skilled and careful data wrangler/analyst while also able to relate theory and data. 👇

This university bookstore is a giant Stroop test

The Journal of Sex Research Volume 62, Issue 5 of The Journal of Sex Research

Issue 5 of #JSexResearch is now online with contributions from @drjustingarcia.bsky.social @mlchivers.bsky.social @typicaltims.bsky.social @drkristenmark.bsky.social
@kinseyinstitute.bsky.social @sexsciencesociety.bsky.social
www.tandfonline.com/toc/hjsr20/6...

Incredibly disappointed in my riding of London - Fanshawe that someone voted in the CPC candidate who nobody seems to know. Rip NDP.

Picture of an advanced polling station for the 2025 Canadian Federal Election. Locations are open across Canada today and tomorrow for advanced polling.

Great day to take care of an important task. Get out and visit an advanced polling location this weekend!