Štěpán Bahník

In a new paper with Michael Arntz, we show that larger gifts, monetary gifts, and gifts given in a purely professional relationship are more likely to be perceived as bribes: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

In a new short conceptual/review paper with @petrhoudek.bsky.social, we describe how groups or organizations can become corrupt due to selection and sorting effects, socialisation, institutional capture, and norm entrenchment: authors.elsevier.com/c/1ltb3,rU~O...

Selection effects and long-term group processes are often ignored in psychology and we also provide some methodological recommendations. We have other papers that try to take self-selection seriously in studies of cheating. But the idea can be extended to other topics.

Some commonly proposed interventions might not work in a real-world organization context because of the processes described in the paper.

The proposed model includes a positive feedback loop, meaning that even a slight tendency for, e.g., (self-)selection of dishonest people in an organization can result in fully corrupt organization after some time.

In a new short conceptual/review paper with @petrhoudek.bsky.social, we describe how groups or organizations can become corrupt due to selection and sorting effects, socialisation, institutional capture, and norm entrenchment: authors.elsevier.com/c/1ltb3,rU~O...

Never mind that my colleagues are reading and citing the document on PsyArXiv. For this manuscript to count as a legitimate scientific product I must first endure inexplicable delays; arbitrary formatting requirements (the formatting manual costs $47.99); conflicts between my scholarly values and the astronomical profits that private publishing companies make from our taxpayer funded work; introduction of errors into my manuscript by the journal’s proofreaders; websites from hell; and of course peer review. Without that process of publication, my work will remain a ‘preprint’—an incomplete and unreliable artifact unworthy of a place in the scientific literature. Could things be better? I surmise that, like fish unaware of their wet surrounds, academics don’t feel the pain because it’s all they’ve ever known. For one, peer review has nothing to do with commercial journals or publishers—it’s the voluntary labor of our colleagues in service of scientific progress. We could, right now, be reviewing each others work on PREreview or Review Commons. Alas, instead of these scholarly debates we are complacent with pretending that a 40% profit margin industry is somehow facilitating the peer-review process better than the transparent platforms already available to us, for free.

I argue that the time is right for widespread adoption of open review platforms like PREreview (prereview.org) and Review Commons (www.reviewcommons.org) and reject the arbitrary administrative overhead imposed on us by the publication industry.

Nice post from Matti on preprints and the nonsense of journals. This paragraph is outstanding.

10 years ago?! Holy smokes.

An exploration of basic human values in 38 million obituaries over 30 years | PNAS How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how perso...

🪦 New in @pnas.org: we analyzed 38 million U.S. obituaries to ask what signals a life well lived:

What values are people most remembered for?

How do legacies shift with cultural events?

How do age and gender shape what it means to have lived well?

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Bestiary of Questionable Research Practices in Psychology - Tamás Nagy, Jane Hergert, Mahmoud M. Elsherif, Lukas Wallrich, Kathleen Schmidt, Tal Waltzer, Jason W. Payne, Biljana Gjoneska, Yashvin Seet... Questionable research practices (QRPs) pose a significant threat to the quality of scientific research. However, historically, they remain ill-defined, and a co...

🧌This "bestiary" can be a vital resource for researchers, educators, and reviewers to recognize, understand, and mitigate QRPs, ultimately raising the standard of psychological research. Read the full article here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We show that cheaters are willing to pay to be able to cheat even when cheating leads to a loss for a charity.

Honest participants do not overbid the cheaters to prevent the them from harming the charity.

The payment also seems to lead the cheaters to cheat even more to compensate for the costs.

Our new paper on self-selection effects in dishonesty with @petrhoudek.bsky.social, @marekhudik.bsky.social, and Nicolas Say is out now: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMN67tbfH...

> However, the new study directly tested this explanation and did not find support for it. It does not explain the null effects in other studies well too.

At this point, more replications of fluency effect would be useful to find out on which effects it is possible to build.

> I do not follow the literature closely anymore, but it does not seem to me that there is an accepted explanation why some effects replicate and others do not. One explanation was that the effect requires a comparison of fluency levels. That is, it would work only in within-subject designs. >

> That does not mean that fluency research is all false. In the paper from the previous post, we for example replicated the association between pronounceability and judgment of novelty. In another paper of mine, more difficult-to-pronounce pseudowords were liked less: bahniks.com/files/disflu... >

> In our paper, we found that an effect of pronounceability on judgment of harmfulness replicates only with the stimuli used in the original study, but not with newly created stimuli (a blog post about this study: bahniks.com/if-its-easy-... ):
bahniks.com/files/fluenc... >

> A famous effect of font legibility on deliberate processing failed to replicate in Many Labs 2: >

Research on processing fluency used to be very popular with publications in Psychological Science, PNAS, etc. Now there are several prominent failed replications of fluency effects. A newest one: bsky.app/profile/dani... >

Does ChatGPT help with students' learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking? We re-analyzed a recently published meta-analysis and found that the original conclusion is almost entirely driven by publication bias.

If you were interested in reading more about it, I have two relevant review papers: bahniks.com/files/anchor... and osf.io/preprints/ps...

There are multiple explanations for the anchoring effect. Research suggesting operation of numeric priming largely does not replicate. Selective accessibility model postulates a two-stage process, the second of which is akin to a priming effect and there the evidence is more equivocal.

We wrote about this 10 years ago: bahniks.com/good-things-...

2025 European Meeting of the Economic Science Association in Brno, Czech Republic | 2025 ESA European Meeting Join the European Meeting of the Economic Science Association 2025 at Masaryk University.

Submissions for our 2025 ESA European Meeting are now open!
Send your abstract by May 5 and join us in September in Brno
@econmuni.bsky.social More info:👇 esa2025.econ.muni.cz #econtwitter #econsky

🧵Three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, EU, UK and other nations vowed to wage economic war, via the toughest sanctions in history.
So... how's that going?
We've spent months documenting what ACTUALLY happened. Here's a thread of our investigations on the REAL story on sanctions... 👇

I Have Written You A Book On Forensic Metascience Use it to cause trouble

Friends, I have written you a book on forensic metascience.

It is free. You can have it. Happy St. Valentine's Day.

If you wish to give me a gift back, you can use it to cause trouble - the greatest gift of all.

open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

Which findings should we replicate? Isager et al propose a 'replication value', defined as the maximum expected utility gain when conducting a replication. It is a function of (1) the value of being certain about the claim, and (2) uncertainty about the claim. osf.io/preprints/me...

Last week to apply for a postdoctoral position to work with me, @lubomircingl.bsky.social, and @petrhoudek.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/bahn...
Salary is competitive, position potentially for up to 3 years, projects are interesting, Prague is great to live in, and application process is easy.

We are hiring! The Faculty of Business Administration, Prague University of Economics and Business is inviting applications for the following positions: Up to 3 positions of Postdoctoral Researchers in the fields of...

We are hiring up to 3 postdoctoral researchers in economics, psychology, or organizational studies to join our interdisciplinary group at the Prague University of Economics and Business: im.vse.cz/cevyz/englis...

PhD Position at the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management Are you passionate about advancing marketing research and eager to pursue a PhD in a dynamic, internationally oriented academic environment? Join us at Maastricht University! Job Description The Depar...

Our department at @umsbe.bsky.social has an opening for a PhD position. The focus is on Marketing but defined broadly.
Please spread the word!

www.academictransfer.com/nl/348321/ph...