Burak Sonmez

This is a typical gambler’s fallacy dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5...

Name assimilation increases immigrants' earnings A LOT.

osf.io/preprints/so...

Is meritocratic ideology an "opium of the masses" of sorts that tames redistributive demands? Not for lower income strata. The myriad mechanisms through which the rich exert disproportionate influence are probably better explanations of why we do not observe higher redistribution.

Check it out!😊👇

Congrats! This goes straight into my reference list 😊

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨
Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated po...

This study shows when a prompt requests something disallowed, turning it into a poem rather than a direct plain-text request can trick the model into complying!

So worried your survey/experiment cannot tell humans from AI? Try rhyming at them🥁

arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304

It’s more of a idk-what-to-do-with-this-effect study

No info on inter-coder reliability either. These are basic robustness checks for such RCTs.

I don’t get why the data aren’t publicly available for the study (in a Nature outlet)!
The behavior measured looks more like norm conformity than anything prosocial.
Key modeling details are also missing (e.g clustering by ride).
And without a comparison costume 🤡, can you claim this effect? 🫠

As @seanjwestwood.bsky.social's terrifying new PNAS article demonstrates, LLMs can now pass almost every attention check, mirror personas, stay consistent across pages, and systematically bias responses in the aggregate.

So here’s a different angle: verify physical presence, not text.

Time for the polygenic remix

Silicon Samples: When AI Replaces Human Subjects in Social Science Why AI respondents may distort our understanding of messy human behaviour

Speaking of AI agents mimicking human behaviour, I wrote this post on how models can reproduce human-like patterns on the surface, yet still miss the behavioural noise buraksonmez.substack.com/p/silicon-sa...

As a way moving forward, upstream vetting and downstream behavioural metadata help expose synthetic distributions, so the focus shouldn’t be only on chasing individual bots

Visas are a key tool for states to regulate incoming mobility from abroad, which can have ramifications for the establishment and perpetuation of global inequalities. In this article, we systematically analyze visa appointment wait times in German embassies and consulates worldwide. Using computational methods, we collect—and publish—fine-grained longitudinal data on the closest available appointment dates for various visa types, covering a total of 16,182 visa appointment requests. Our analysis reveals strong and systematic variance: the poorer the country a diplomatic mission is based in, the longer the wait time and the lower the chances of finding an available appointment (which ranges from almost 0 to 100 percent). We also argue that Germany’s system is quite opaque compared to other established immigration countries such as the U.S. These core findings raise important questions in light of current debates about global justice, legal pathways to migration, and efforts to attract foreign talent.

Graph that shows that 44.1 percent of requests did not lead to an appointment that could be selected. For the 55.9 percent where an appointment was available the distribution of wait times follows a steep curve with short wait times in many cases and a long tail of few cases with very long wait times of up to 98 days.

The average wait times and chances to find an appointment varied a lot between Germany's diplomatic missions. The latter range from almost 0 to 100 percent.

This variance is not random. Rather, economic wellbeing (GDP per capita) is a key predictor of wait times and chances of finding an appointment. The poorer the country a German embassy/consulate is based in, the longer the wait time and the lower the chances of finding an appointment.

New #openaccess study

We made >16,000 visa appointment requests at German embassies and consulates worldwide

Key finding: The poorer the country, the longer the wait time and the lower the chance to get an appointment.

"A time panelty for the Global South?"
shorturl.at/ZiAFb

Online panel quality has always been a cat-and-mouse game. Sophistication of fraud followed by sophistication of detection. IMO doomerism-bias doesn’t help, yet it just lowers the quality of peer review over time.

Oxford's year is divided into three terms and three vacations. Within each term, a 'Full Term' of eight weeks is the main teaching period.

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars (Forthcoming Article) - We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conferenc...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Gender Differences in Economics Seminars" by Pascaline Dupas, Amy Handlan, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Mateo Seré, Haoyu Sheng, Justin Wolfers, and Seminar Dynamics Collective. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Digital Distractions with Peer Influence: The Impact of Mobile App Usage on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes* Abstract. Concerns about excessive mobile phone use among youth are mounting. We present estimates of both behavioral and contextual peer effects, along wi

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Digital Distractions with Peer Influence: The Impact of Mobile App Usage on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes,” by Barwick, Chen, Fu, and Li: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Methods training in sociology varies wildly unlike in econ. Tbh this isn’t even about experimental design, it’s intro-level potential outcomes framework stuff…

Often hard to justify whether this is the main reason, but reviewers frame this as a “major limitation” in the paper. Imo editors in these outlets care more about unanimous decisions given the submission volumes

I wish it was just one design or occasion, and these are the discipline’s top outlets.

Almost 2026.
Randomised. Balanced.
Still rejected for omitted variable bias.

Formal training in sociology keeps failing the peer review system 🫠

And the 1st Replication Award of the Academy of Sociology goes to..

Sergio Lo Iacono, Wojtek Przepiorka, Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten, Marcel van Assen, and Arnout van de Rijt

for "The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions revisited: A multilab replication"

#AkadSoz25 #sociology

1/

I’m a newbie on Substack 🚀

I show how simulating donation behaviour data through LLMs can generate false positives.

LLMs rationalise, but human behaviour is noisy.

buraksonmez.substack.com/p/silicon-sa...

I’m a newbie on Substack 🚀

I show how simulating donation behaviour data through LLMs can generate false positives.

LLMs rationalise, but human behaviour is noisy.

buraksonmez.substack.com/p/silicon-sa...

Scholarship opportunities for studying MSc/MA Sociology (shorturl.at/RiL2P) @sriucl.bsky.social:

📌Master's Bursary: shorturl.at/gKkvx
📌Global Master's Scholarship: shorturl.at/sift7
📌Humanitarian Scholarship: shorturl.at/y9qsL
📌Chevening: www.chevening.org

Applications open from October 13!

🚨 Job alert: Postdoc at NYU Abu Dhabi. You’ll uncover how group boundaries form online using virtual experiments + digital trace data and work with a fantastic trio: Mario Molina, Minsu Park & Blaine Robbins. Apply by 1 Nov 2025. 👇🏼

apply.interfolio.com/173544

Ozan Aksoy

Welcome to @aksoyundan.bsky.social, who has joined us as Associate Professor in Sociology! 🎉

His research covers religious behaviour, cooperation and trust 🤝

Game theory, statistical and computational methods are amongst his research tools 💻🎲

www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/people/ozan-...

New paper, using conjoint experiments to study ingroup preferences across multiple settings (neighborhoods, civic orgs, sports clubs) and social dimensions (age, ethnicity, education). We also link people's choices in the experiments to the real-world contexts they are embedded in.

More info 👇