Fabian Hutmacher

🚨 New publication: How to improve conceptual clarity in psychological science?

Thrilled to see this article with @ruimata.bsky.social out. We discuss how LLMs can be leveraged to map, clarify, and generate psychological measures and constructs.

Open access article: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Have you ever tried explaining your research with ... a short story?! 🤔

Believe me, it's extremely gratifying to change your perspective and let your creativity run loose. 💙

Then YOU can be a guest author for @scienceandfiction.net! 😱

DM me for more info 😁

It‘s such an important step forward to have these kinds of diamond open access journals hosted and funded by universities (or similar institutions) as a real alternative to all the established for-profit publishers!

ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions!

Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.

Reciprocal effects between information and communication technology literacy and conventional literacies Information and communication technology (ICT) literacy encompasses a range of cognitive abilities that facilitate the effective use of digital techno…

The ability to efficiently use digital technologies is a fundamental skill in modern society. In a recent paper, I explored the cognitive roots of information and communication technology (ICT) literacy and its relation to traditional competence domains.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks for sharing! Completely agree, he is such a brilliant writer!

Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies npj Complexity - The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies

The result of this super cool work with Henrik Olsson, @abhishekr0y.bsky.social, @hdschulze.bsky.social, Stan Rhodes, and Alison Mansheim can now be found online - and we hope you like it as much as we do 😍https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00053-z- Core ideas also summarized below 🔽

We are hiring 11 Doctoral Researchers (100%) in the DFG-RTG "The Experience of Stories in the Digital Age". Uni Wuerzburg, Germany. Disciplines: Communication, Psychology, Computer Science. Topics: VR / XR, storytelling robots, influencers, misinformation. More: go.uniwue.de/rtg3087jobs Please share

A mock-up of what the first page of “The promise and limitations of using GenAI to reduce climate scepticism” (Hornsey et al., 2025) article would look like printed.

Thrilled to share my first publication in a Nature journal!

Our new article in Nature Climate Change (@natclimate.nature.com) explores whether conversations with generative AI tools like ChatGPT may help shift climate scepticism.

Thanks to @hansalves.bsky.social and @wilhelmhofmann.bsky.social for organizing such a great #FGSP2025 @ruhr-uni-bochum.de!

Thanks also for including a tour through the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum. Reminded me of the stories my grandfather told who worked as a miner in the region (see the pictures)

Arne Stolp introduced a measure for capturing ideological bias expression … and I wrapped up the session with some thoughts about our current knowledge (and the gaps in our current knowledge) about motivated reasoning. Thank you to all of you for the great exchange!

Marlene Altenmüller demonstrated that motivated reasoning can also be found in the context of art perception and aesthetic judgments

Philipp Schmid presented evidence from a meta-analysis on the impact of exposure to health misinformation on belief in health misinformation, tapping into another hot topic of our times (unfortunately).

Kevin Winter talked about conspiracy beliefs and motivated reception in the context of the sustainability transformation. Such an important topic in the face of climate change!

This morning at #FGSP2025 @ruhr-uni-bochum.de we had a symposium on current views on motivated reasoning with talks from @marlephie.bsky.social @kwinter.bsky.social @philippschmid.bsky.social and Arne Stolp (from @tobiasrothmund.bsky.social‘s lab) and myself.

For some more details, here’s a🧵

We have three (online) talks on motivated cognition this fall, everyone interested is very welcome to join… schedule here:

Thank you to @mepsy.bsky.social for this honorable mention for my paper with @markusappel.bsky.social and Stephan Schwan - and congratulations to the winners of the Best Paper Award! :)

AI & Collective Memory In this review, I show how Generative AI (GAI) utterly transforms how we represent, access, expose and cover, find and lose, sanitise and toxify, use …

AI & COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The agentic turn shatters collective memory through three key forces:

(1) The war on human agency.

(2) The sharding of the self

(3) The new haunting

My latest article in Current Opinion of Psychology.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Join our team at In-Mind: We are looking for 2 new editors and 3-4 people for our social media team!

Global Analysis of Perceived Social Media Effects on Well-Being | Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking What impact do people think social media has on their well-being? To answer this question, we adopted a global perspective, analyzing 7.1 million observations from 191,672 users across 182 countries. ...

Asking the users themselves, how does social media affect their well-being?

In a large-scale study we find: Social media has a negative but small effect. Other aspects s/a listening to music appear more relevant. Effects differ across users and countries. 🧵1/6

www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A Cross-Sectional Study of the Completeness of Preregistrations by Psychological Authors From German-Speaking Institutions - Lena Hahn, Andreas Glöckner, Mario Gollwitzer, Jens Hellmann, Jens Lange, S... Preregistering confirmatory research aims at reducing researchers’ degrees of freedom and increasing transparency to ultimately increase replicability. Yet the ...

How complete are preregistrations?

Short answer: 53% include all 6 procedural specifications

Medium answer: 🧵

Long answer: check out my publication with A. Glöckner @mariogollwitzer.bsky.social J. Hellmann, J. Lange, S. Schindler & @kaisassenberg.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1177/2515...

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....

Thanks for bringing this podcast to my attention, Uljana! Great recommendation!

Agreed! It’s interesting to consider that the same kind of mechanisms (the two-step process that you describe) could lead to both rational/desirable and biased/undesirable outcomes …

Open question: How do we determine whether what individuals think and do after (not) getting a ticket is a rational and competent response - or rather a post-hoc rationalization of their experience that makes them feel better?

Very interesting an fun study! You interpret the changes in attitudes and behavior as a positive sign (i.e., individuals act as informed citizens). As a social psychologist, I‘d have the opposite intuition when seeing the results and claim that this is a case of motivated reasoning.

How come that all these celebrities (dead and alive, real and fictional) have their own predatory journals and want me to publish in them?

So far, I got mails from Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Charles Darwin, George Orwell - and even Bridget Jones!

Has anyone else had the same experience?

figure showing nine data points (each for a distinct publisher) in a graph where Y-axis is our open science index and X-axis is academia friendliness (=proportion of published journals co-owned by an academic entity); strong positive relationship

Non-profit publishers (PLoS, Oxford, Cambridge) and publishers partnering a lot with academia (Wiley) are much more committed to open science than the others - MDPI being the worst by large. (4/5)

using AI to review a paper is one thing (and there's a lot to be said abt that), but submitting a paragraph-long AI summary as a review is a whole 'nother level of laziness. editors, flag that shit & never pass it along to the authors. also don't accept any papers or reviews from that reviewer.