Liam Wignall

"New research published in the International Journal of Sexual Health suggests that the reasons why individuals watch pornography are more predictive of their sexual health than how often they watch it." via @psypost.bsky.social www.realclearscience.com/2026/01/20/w...

I'm enjoying seeing the influx of new people to bluesky - I'm just going to have to post more now...

oh it's going to be a Recession recession

I can still hear the noise it made calling people

Registering for something online - part of the sign up process was asking my 'Skype Username' - that was a throwback

Weed Companies Are Cashing In on Dry January High January, here we come.

Weed companies are using Dry January to market their gummies and drinks, Yasmin Tayag reports—but does taking the edge off sobriety with THC really count as “dry”?

#72: Shag a massive apple

It seems everybody and their friends/family decided to do legs today at the gym. While I'm also trying to do legs. It's very inconvenient.

A screenshot from the Traitors with Stephen in the confessional wearing a shirt with a distinctive red, white, and blue angular pattern

A photo of an Avanti West Coast Class 805 with a similar red, white, and blue angular design

#TheTraitors cast members as UK railway liveries.

Stephen as an Avanti West Coast Class 805

Beyond Monogamy: What Sociology Reveals About How We Really Relate by @ryanscoatsphd.bsky.social.

www.bcu.ac.uk/research/blo...

Hello! Hopefully some stuff will be coming out later this year :)

Ahh thank you! :)

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

I'm using January to finally sort out things. Ive got over 1000 files in my downloads and my folders have too many things in different places. This is the year of keeping on top of things (and not saving files as FINAL MANUSCRIPT VERSION 3.5...)

How universities can cultivate arts and humanities in practical, affordable ways Are the arts and humanities still needed as universities retrench staff and cut costs? Patty Raun explains why curtailing or eliminating these disciplines is an egregious mistake

Are the arts and humanities still needed as universities retrench staff and cut costs? Patty Raun explains why curtailing or eliminating these disciplines is an egregious mistake: https://ow.ly/BGJ350XR8Oz #HigherEd #AcademicSky #EduSky

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

AI research itself is facing a slop problem with some authors claiming to produce over 100 papers a year
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The difference is a huge corporation not acknowledging the impact of their choice

Pantone colour of the year being white is just tone deaf.

Are mainstream films finally getting BDSM right? Pillion and Babygirl are some of the most recent examples of kink representation in mainstream cinema. But how did BDSM become romcom material?

I did an interview with Mashable about #Pillion, discussing how kink is often represented in popular media. It's a great short contextual insight that you can watch here: mashable.com/video/romcom...

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.

24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines

www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Episode 450: The Weird History Of Masturbation - Sex and Psychology In today's show, we're talking about the history of masturbation and why our relationship with self-pleasure is so complicated.

While “No Nut November” is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has deep roots and reflects humans’ longstanding and very complicated relationship with self-pleasure. Dr. Eric Sprankle https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/podcast/episode-450-the-weird-history-of-masturbation/

Far too little attention's given to this in research methods training. And since online surveys are now the default method - wrongly assumed to be quick, easy and cheap - we're in a big mess of our own making.

Even if 'real people' respond, surveys are often so badly designed data is meaningless.

Just made this. I’m a widely respected intellectual, you know

One in Five People Report Having Been in a Sexually Open Relationship - Sex and Psychology How many people have ever been involved in a consensual non-monogamous (CNM) relationship before? The results of two recent studies involving nationally representative samples (one from the United States and one from Canada) reached nearly identical conclusions: approximately 20% (or 1 in 5) respondents said they had.The U.S. study is from 2016 and it was previously covered on the blog here; however, the Canadian study just came out, so here are a few of the highlights from it.

Although only 2-3% of people say they're currently in an open relationship, about 1 in 5 say they've had an open relationship before. https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2019/4/17/one-in-five-people-report-having-been-in-a-sexually-open-relationship/

a mental health crisis among British students whilst universities are pushing faculty to accept or even encourage students using generative AI is a catastrophe waiting to happen

Can everyone please just stop using AI until it's actually good

Evidence that academics have been complaining about service roles for about 3000 years...

YouTube video by Mariah Carey Mariah Carey - It's Time!!!! (2025)

And now, an official broadcast from the Queen

youtu.be/Nn2KZOiYgUY?...