Sebastian Trautmann

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Im Wissenschaftssystem entstehen durch Befristungen, Unterbesetzungen, strukturelle Prekarität keine Vakuumsituationen, sondern informelle Verschiebungen von Arbeit, Verantwortung, Macht.
Diese Diffusion stabilisiert das System auf Kosten derer, die am wenigsten abgesichert sind.
#IchBinHanna

Very excited to introduce InteroMap, a new bodily mapping tool designed to measure how we subjectively experience our bodily sensations, what we call interoceptive phenomenology 🧵👇

INSPECT-SR: a tool for assessing trustworthiness of randomised controlled trials Precis The integrity of evidence synthesis is threatened by problematic randomised controlled trials (RCTs). These are RCTs where there are serious concerns about the trustworthiness of the data or fi...

BTW, I can recommend to get familiar with this one:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
It helps to judge the trustworthiness of RCTs

Racial Resentment Among Hispanic and Asian Americans by Birth Year and Demographics This figure contains four line charts showing racial resentment scores (standardized 2-item scale) across birth years from 1940 to 2000 among Hispanic and Asian Americans, with separate trendlines for demographic subgroups. Y-axis ranges from low to high resentment; X-axis shows birth year with approximate ages. Education panel: Two lines show that non-college individuals consistently report higher racial resentment than college-educated individuals. Both groups trend upward from younger to older cohorts, with the gap largest among older generations. Gender panel: Male and female lines rise gradually with older cohorts. Males show slightly higher resentment than females across most cohorts, though the gap narrows among older groups. Geography panel: Four regional lines (South, West, Midwest, Northeast) show modest differences. The South and Midwest trend slightly higher than the West and Northeast, and all regions show increasing resentment among older cohorts. Religion panel: Protestants display the highest resentment levels, followed by Catholics. Non-affiliated respondents have the lowest and flattest trend, with little increase across cohorts. Protestants show the steepest age-related rise. At the bottom, the source notes this is from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) using GAM-smoothed trendlines.

4/🧵 The generational shift isn't just among white Americans. Young Asian and Hispanic Americans show the same pattern: dramatic declines in racial resentment across education, gender, geography, and religion. This is a broad, multi-racial generational transformation.

Great perspective from #CDSM2025: causal inference is 'what-if' analysis. You don’t have to get everything perfect—or how dare you use the c-word. What matters is laying out your assumptions transparently and showing us what happens when they're violated.

Calibrating scientific skepticism – a wider look at the field of transgenerational epigenetics I recently wrote a blogpost examining the supposed evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TGEI) in hu...

Calibrating scientific skepticism www.wiringthebrain.com/2018/07/cali... - I wrote this a few years ago in relation to claims of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans, but the issues relate equally to the kind of microbiome studies we assess in the paper linked below...

Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.

Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉

As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices

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

“Cake causes herpes?” - promiscuous dichotomisation induces false positives - BMC Medical Research Methodology Background Continuous biomedical data is often dichotomized into two or more groups for analysis, despite long-standing warnings from statisticians that this constitutes bad practice. This dichotomisa...

Nice one, from @drg.bsky.social and @jamesheathers.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Heart rate variability (HRV) is one of the widely used physiological measures in psychophysiological research. But with over 100 indices to choose from, how do we know which ones to use?

In our latest paper, we take a data-driven approach to help answer this.

doi.org/10.1111/psyp...
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A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea:

"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"

Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...

First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!!

Goodness gracious.

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

🌍 Alcohol causes 2.6 million premature deaths each year, yet remains the world’s favourite drug. 🍺

A major Lancet Public Health study shows most countries are far off WHO’s 2030 target to cut drinking by 20%.

🧵 THREAD

#PublicHealth #Addiction #AlcoholPolicy #GlobalHealth

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Do trauma-focused interventions change what we remember – or only how we remember it?
In her dissertation, @milenaaleksic.bsky.social explored this question through a series of experimental studies.

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Applied Causal Graphs 2026 workshop teaser - stay tuned!

BERLIN + CAUSAL GRAPHS = HAPPINESS.
Agree?
Follow: bsky.app/profile/appl...
Spoiler: Edition #3 in the making for Q2 2026! Stay tuned!

Finally a study on the smallest worthwhile effect for psychotherapy to treat depression. Sobering.

From sensitive screening to staff supervision, the message is simple: ⏱️ time matters.
Time to listen, time to process, time to reflect.

Read the blog to explore how perinatal services can make trauma-informed care a reality:
buff.ly/SheP8qa

New method to estimate heterogeneity of treatment effects by comparing the cumulative response distributions for the treatment vs.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@f2harrell.bsky.social @stephensenn.bsky.social

YouTube video by Suzanna D Why is There a Rise in Youth Aggression?

Check out my lab member's entry to a CIHR IHDCYH short video competition.
Here is a short video on the rise of aggression from COVID: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbv5...
Here is the link to vote (vote for Suzanna Dinh): cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/54519.html

Four interesting methods & stats winter courses at Leiden University also open to researchers and PhD candidates who are not affiliated with us.

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/social-be...

The hardest, recurring psychological task of my life has been learning to accept the absurdity of existence, to see ambition and achievement for the false gods they are, and to understand, truly understand, how one can flourish in what looks, from the outside, like mediocrity.

My Shiny app containing 3530 Open Science blog posts discussing the replication crisis is updated - you can now use the SEARCH box. I fixed it as my new PhD Julia wanted to know who had called open scientists 'Methodological Terrorists' :) shiny.ieis.tue.nl/open_science...

⏰ Last chance to register for #CDSM2025!

Don't miss your chance to join us Nov 12–13 for two days of talks & debates at the intersection of causality, data science & AI.

💻 Online | 🎟️ Free
👉 causalscience.org

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced economic cost

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wouldn't it be great to gather top social science journal editors + experts on fraud-prevention to discuss better ways to fraud-proof our field @ the National Academies? This is happening! Step 1 is creating an organizing committee. Submit nominees by 11/7:
www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/enh...

Screenshot of https://powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com/

🎉 @rpsychologist.com 's PowerLMM.js is the online statistics application of the year 2025 🎉

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

- Calculate power (etc) for multilevel models
- Examine effects of dropout and other important parameters
- Fast! (Instant results)

Poster 30. Psychotherapietage NRW Link zur Tagung: www.psychotherapietage-nrw.de

Ausschnitt aus dem Programm: KV 3 Persönlichkeitsstörungen im ICD-11: Behandlung struktureller Störungen der Persönlichkeitsfunktion neu denken Ulrike Dinger-Ehrenthal, Düsseldorf Johannes C. Ehrenthal, Köln Aleksandra Kaurin, Wuppertal

Ich freue mich auf unsere Klinische Vorlesung bei den 30. Psychotherapietagen NRW zur Behandlung von Persönlichkeiten, die morgen beginnt!

A randomized controlled trial testing the effects of sequential psychotherapy in depression: Changing therapist, or both therapist and method? This study examined the effectiveness of sequential psychotherapy strategies for adults with major depressive disorder who did not respond to an initi…

Does changing the therapist and/or method after non-response lead to better outcomes? Not according to this RCT.