Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.

Do not do this.

"The thing is, even if you're just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn't the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is."

And yet people were in fact shifted in the right direction on civil rights, multiple times, which means these viewpoints aren’t fixed!

This kind of dataset is a clear indicator that propaganda plays a big role in people's political positions and acting like people are unshiftable is just completely detached from reality

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta’s AI by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%, NewsGuard found. None of the companies responded to NewsGuard’s request for a comment at the time.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Internet erupts as MAGA influencers exposed for being based in other countries A large number of MAGA social media influencers were exposed over the weekend as being being based in other countries.Podcaster Matt Binder posted screenshots showing that Charlie’s Voice Rising, a po...

Social media could work differently. We teach digital literacy, but ppl often can’t apply those lessons w/in systems that obscure where info comes from & how it gets to them. What might social media look like if users had better signals of information provenance? www.rawstory.com/maga-foreign...

YouTube video by Simon Clark The future of climate denial

Good news everyone! I've joined the sci-comm effort as a researcher for @simonoxfphys.com 🔍 Check out the first videos I've worked on below!

Stay til the end for a cameo and a link to a Nebula-exclusive interview on misinfo ✨

Reel version for the time-deprived: www.youtube.com/shorts/3FgnQ...

All the more reason for universities to stand strong - the public recognizes this is a rotten deal

My message to Vanderbilt and all univs - "it is essential to reject the entire idea of trading away institutional, faculty and student freedoms for government benefits"

bsky.app/profile/lkfa...

Knowledge Is Worth Your Time A few thoughts about why we must embrace the hard work of learning.

Newsletter subscribers should have it in their inbox by now news.chanda.science/archive/know...

The worry here is that Meta has sent @cos.io and researchers on a years-long goose chase to identify harm, without providing the exact data they would need to find it. The risk is that the study turns out goose-eggs (nulls) owing to design bias, and Meta can cite that as evidence everything is OK.

They're trying to prevent the student newspaper from printing news, period. Not just a particular story.

"The Media School directed us to print no news in the paper... nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage."

We need to talk about how social media algorithms push moms down a slippery slope of distrust.

From "Are my kids getting enough support in school?" To "Maybe I should homeschool." To "Maybe modern medicine is bad."

I've seen this first-hand in research I'm doing on parenting apps. 1/🧵

Someone on Twitter replies to me: "meh. buy american or stfu." Two hours later, in a separate thread, the write: "$30 for a single button-up is ridiculous unless it is decent quality silk."

This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States.

Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵

Proud of my Vanderbilt colleagues for making it clear that our university should reject the proposed "Compact". As I state below - this deal is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms. (And yay to MIT for their clear rejection today!)

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain. Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.

New from me and @brendannyhan.bsky.social

Why Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence" is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Psychology has a generalizability problem and it is harmful at multiple levels for the science. This stems from a few issues. There is no training in how to effectively create a sampling strategy in order to generalize.

What Psychology doesn’t understand about sampling and selection bias-hurts our science and what we can offer to our communities from our science. This paper tries to provide some way to address some of these concerns.

Is this truly a no? Dartmouth clearly won't sign the version sent on Oct 1st. (I don't think any uni will). But it's vital that universities reject this approach in totality, not start a negotiation for better terms. To me, that statement leaves the door open for signing a "better" deal.

Does anyone use #RedCap for child participant database management? If so, would you be willing to share screenshots etc. of what your user interface looks like or share the template, whichever is easier.

#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #devpsyc #AcademicSky #cogsci

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 only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us."

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

While I had been using rainbow parentheses for a while, I only recently found out about rainbow indentation thanks to @ijlyttle.bsky.social and @3mmarand.bsky.social 🌈 #rstats

The President of Texas A&M fired a lecturer & removed a dept. chair + Dean of the College because a class addressed gender. And he was still forced to resign a week later.

Capitulation buys nothing, so may as well go down swinging. Really wish our institutions of higher ed could learn the lesson.

former CDC official Dr. Houry: "I first learned that the secretary had changed our CDC covid vaccine guidance on an X social media post. CDC scientists have still not seen the scientific data or justification for this change. That is not gold standard science."

it's so funny to see America's health insurance companies be like "look. If there's one thing we love it's denying you care. but we ran the numbers - and we cannot BELIEVE we're saying this - and it's cheaper for us to just pay for the vaccines than deal with you going to the ER."

New people are signing our open letter almost everyday, and it is so heartening to see. Especially good to see familiar names sign.

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Community wants to save 20,000 books after Black bookstore shuts down The Kansas City Defender, a local news nonprofit and Black-led advocacy group, plans to reopen the 20,000-book collection to the public.

A nonprofit wants to turn Willa’s Books & Vinyl, a bookstore dedicated to Black history in Kansas City, Missouri, into a public archive.

Founder Willa Robinson wants young Black readers to see themselves in what they read, and she fears that such books will be banned.

KFF chart titled “Few Parents Say They Think False Statements About Vaccines and Measles are True, But At Least 4 in 10 Express Uncertainty.” The stacked bar chart shows percent who say specific false claims about vaccines and diseases are true, they don't know enough to say, or are false.

Parents are uncertain about what to believe when it comes to false claims about vaccines and measles.

While relatively few parents believe the false claim that the MMR vaccine can cause autism, nearly half say they don’t know enough to say. https://on.kff.org/4nqSlZG