Erin Westgate

Fun fact, Lewin is my academic great-great-great grandfather! 😂

(Me <- Wilson <- Nisbett <- Schachter <- Festinger <- Lewin)

My grad advisor was (and still is) great about this. He routinely turns down interviews on my work and points them towards me instead. It is gracious and deeply appreciated - an example to model for sure

💥New paper alert! Dyadic Decisions About Effort: How Caregivers Shape Young Children’s Persistence (with @reutshachnai.bsky.social)

One of my favorites! If you’re curious about what we’ve been up to in @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social, take a look!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

From X: Renaud Foucart @RenaudFoucart Few people now this but the Epstein library can be used to bypass academic journal paywalls. You search for a paper and if someone sent it to Epstein the pdf is there.

New sci-hub just dropped.

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?"
We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity)
📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps
📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok
📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers
osf.io/preprints/ps...

This social psychologist reluctantly concedes a point to Team Personality 😭

Tally one for personality on the "person situation debate scoreboard" that the psychologists in the Epstein files are pretty uniformly high on dominance, narcissism, need for admiration. Haven't come across a single "Oh, HIM? Never would have guessed!"

Here’s What the Latest Epstein Files Say About His Ties to Higher Ed New documents released by the Department of Justice on Friday reinforce that long after his criminal convictions, many prominent professors continued to communicate with him.

Here’s What the Latest Epstein Files Say About His Ties to Higher Ed: Collectively, the files underscore how deeply Epstein remained embedded in academic and intellectual circles even after his criminal history became public. www.chronicle.com/article/here...

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Bridge Over Troubled Water

an insect, a bird, and an elephant visualized with unit height scaling. insect is landscape shaped and the elephant is portrait shaped

Why is it that small animals like insects have a landspace body plan when viewed head-on, but larger animals like elephants are taller than wide?

With @m-v.bsky.social, we find out in our new preprint titled 'Size and shape of terrestrial animals' - arxiv.org/html/2602.00...

Current Chicago Restaurant Faves Current Chicago Restaurant Faves Coffee Sawada, West Loop Favourite coffee shop for hanging: Avondale Coffee Club There are no great coffee shops in the Loop (that I know of), but the best place to ...

Lots of overlap with this list I created recently for some Chi-town visitors...

I also heartily endorse everything on Jin and Lydia's list that isn't on mine!

(Caveat: no cheap eats on this list, due to who I created it for)

Chicago Restaurant Recs Chicago Restaurant Recommendations from Jin Goh and Lydia Emery Chicago has an amazing food scene. You can get a great meal in pretty much any neighborhood, all of which have unique culture, food, an...

SPSP is just around the corner and in our backyard of Chicago! @lydiaemery.bsky.social and I love the Chicago food scene, and we've put together a list of places we like. We hope this will help you enjoy and explore Chicago!! See y'all soon!!

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

exactly. this is not difficult.

as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...

Sifting through Animal Behavior Society newsletters and came across a castigation of the field made by Dutch ethologist Adriaan Kortlandt in 1990. He states, "Ethology is supposed to be the study of behaviour, but the behaviour has become invisible." He also used to fight goats during lectures.

I am so sorry.

Here’s what they found:

Women are interrupted more often than men—by about 10–20% in economics seminars.

Those interruptions are more likely to:
- Cut women off mid-sentence
- Come from men
- Be adversarial rather than clarifying in nature

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

“Paddling” down a canal at low tide - we are in the middle of drought conditions and water levels have gotten extremely low.

One of approx 500 manatees huddled for warmth in Three Sisters - some of them are bored/very very curious

Okay but when you get cold, do you get manatees?! Do you??

I thought not.

A very cold morning (20s) in Florida at Three Sisters Spring, Crystal River.

If you have about 20 minutes, I would be grateful if you could help my undergraduate student explore whether common empathy questionnaires are actually interchangable in the ways they are used in the social science literature.

In the foreground, a young American Herring Gull with a drab, worn, brown, "predefinitive" plumage. This bird is probably ~12 months old. Behind, an older, breeding adult in a "definitive" gray and white plumage, which is probably 4 or more years old. We have little information about the ecology and evolution of delayed plumage maturation in seabirds.

A breeding gull attacks a plastic model as part of behavioral experiments at the breeding colony on Kent Island, New Brunswick, Canada.

Coco and Tracey Faber start painting raw plastic models for stimulus experiments, using photo references and museum specimens at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Excited that our paper is headed for publication at Animal Behaviour! - "Experimental study of social signaling through delayed plumage maturation in a colony-nesting seabird."

Our experiments show how the unusual, brown plumages of young seabirds can help reduce aggression at the breeding colony.

The absolute state of academic spam

New signature added: "All emails 100% human-written."

A cartoon showing the various targets of reconstructed eyesalve against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. It targets the cell membrane, as well as several intracellular targets including nucleotide biosynthesis. In S. aureus, it also affect quorum sensing.

Remember the medieval remedy we reconstructed years ago? We've now dissected the various ways it attacks and kills bacteria! Preprinted & submitted, led by @tosinorababa.bsky.social & Jess Furner-Pardoe w/ many collaborators #MicroSky #Ancientbiotics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just a Monday morning reminder that we are searching for a tenure track faculty position in cognitive psychology.

Psych Jobs

Postdoctoral Position in Social Psychology at the University of Bonn (3 years)

Research in moral psychology and related area

If anyone's going through these files, I'm curious if there are any men who firmly stood up to Epstein. I don't mean kindly turning down his invitations. I mean, did anyone tell him outright that the way he treated and talked about women was despicable? Was there a single true ally among these men?

Animals experience joy. Scientists want to measure it Scientists have long focused on quantifying fear and other negative emotions in animals. Now they’re trying to measure positive feelings — and it’s a challenge.

A lovely read about researchers who make animals happy for a living 😊 A day spent playing the sounds of baby bonobo laughter is surely a day well spent

www.sciencenews.org/article/scie...

Figure 2 from paper "Agenda Seeding" shows a decision-tree like diagram in protesters choose nonviolent or violent tactics and the state responds with violent or more restrained forms of force. Figure 2 summarizes the model. In the first period, subordinate group activists attempt to raise awareness through agenda seeding that involves activists employing tactics, possibly nonviolent or violent, which might make the news. News organization still set public agendas but social movements, like any group seeking greater attention or publicity, attempt to entice media to prioritize their concerns. Southern civil rights protests, for example, were often planned for mornings so footage could be flown to New York in time to air nationally on the evening news (Torres Reference Torres2018). Similarly, movement leaders selected Selma, AL, as a site for voting rights protests partly for its proximity to television network affiliates in Montgomery (Torres Reference Torres2018). Media attention, however, can be sympathetic or hostile. Even presented with similar facts, different reporters and news organizations often structure stories in systematically different ways (Davenport and Litras Reference Davenport and Litras2003). Civil disobedience, for example, can be covered as a form of justifiable protest or unjustifiable criminality. Kinder and Kam (Reference Kinder and Kam2010) find that whether an issue can overcome societal biases to become salient depends significantly “on the ability of the issue to command the public’s limited and fickle attention and on how the particular issue is framed” (38). Activists, attuned to the ways in which media can frame an issue, routinely fought to craft narratives through a kind of political theater in which protests were “staged” and injustice “dramatized” (King Jr. Reference King1964; Lewis Reference Lewis2017).

Now, imagine a simple model in which activists opt to engage in nonviolent or violent resistance and then the state responds with typical or excess force. (To be clear, the world is more complicated, but these simplifying assumptions help us describe some common patterns.) 3/

Classic photo of activist John Lewis (later Member of Congress) being beaten by a police officer on Bloody Sunday.

What civil rights leaders learned at the time was that while nonviolence could be an effective tactic, the best outcomes for the movement came when nonviolent protesters were met with brutal state repression that was broadcast around the world. See Rep. John Lewis on Bloody Sunday in Selma. 4/