@cabels18.bsky.social
Post-Doctoral Fellow @unipotsdam.bsky.social, visiting @arc-mpib.bsky.social | PhD @hertieschool.bsky.social | Democracy, Technology, Behavioral Public Policy | Website: https://christophabels.com
🚨New preprint! 🚨
"Boosting metacognition in entangled human-AI interaction to navigate cognitive-behavioral drift"
arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01959
Happy to see this new work coming to the surface alongside @cabels18.bsky.social @lorenzspreen.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social and @stefanherzog.bsky.social
🧵
❄️🎣 What ice-fishing competitions reveal about human decision-making. New paper in @science.org by researchers from @mpib-berlin.bsky.social, @scioi.bsky.social, and the University of Eastern Finland.
👉 Read more: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/newsroom/new...
📄 Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Jeder Unterstützer Trumps muss sich daher die Frage stellen: Was ist mir wichtiger – die amerikanische Demokratie oder „owning the libs“? An der Beantwortung dieser Frage wird sich das Fortbestehen der US-Demokratie entscheiden.
25.01.2026 09:56 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Diese Autokratisierung kann nur noch durch die Gerichte und Wähler aufgehalten werden, wenn die Trump-Regierung der eigenen Machtbasis beraubt würde. Aber würde sich die Regierung an Wahlergebnisse halten, würden sie die Weisungen von Gerichten befolgen? All das erscheint immer unwahrscheinlicher.
25.01.2026 09:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Schritt für Schritt stellt sich die Administration damit nicht nur gegen geltendes Recht, sondern erweitert kontinuierlich ihre Macht. Denn wenn der Tod von Bürgern am helllichten Tag keine rote Linie mehr ist, was soll eine Regierung dann noch aufhalten?
25.01.2026 09:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Die entscheidende Frage ist: Werden der Regierung Grenzen gesetzt? Nach augenscheinlich wahrheitswidrigen Aussagen Trumps und ranghoher Beamter, das Opfer Alex Pretti habe Beamte „massakrieren“ wollen, ist Rechenschaft kaum zu erwarten.
www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...
Die US-Demokratie steht an einem Kipppunkt: Der tödliche Schusswaffeneinsatz gegen Demonstranten ist kein Einzelfall mehr. Wenn die Trump-Regierung damit durchkommt, wird die Autokratisierung der USA kaum noch aufzuhalten sein.
www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amer...
The shooting of Alex Pretti was (US) state sanctioned murder and has been followed up by attempts to destroy evidence and stop local police (and even the FBI) from investigating.
Minnesota police are trying to counter the lies and illegality.
Terrifying
open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...
Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why.
Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
And more below 👇
It's out!!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.
🔬 How has psychology contributed to achieving the 🇺🇳 SDGs?
Our new preprint maps 230,000 psychology articles to the SDGs using our text2sdg R package (www.text2sdg.io) and analyzes historical trends in topics, national and gendered contributions, and citation patterns.
🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2512.08628
We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...
What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
Preprint: Levels of Office and Voter Accountability for Democratic Norm Violations
⚠️New paper fothcoming in POQ! ⚠️
With @marcjacob.bsky.social and @seanjwestwood.bsky.social, we worried about norm-violating local politicians rising to higher office. We tested when voters defect from such politicians in local, state and federal races.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵...
Super important work, thanks for sharing!
26.10.2025 10:05 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Very glad to hear that!
09.10.2025 09:00 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Thank you so much for spreading the word! We are really in a crucial period right now - and everyone should understand that protecting democracy is at its core a joint endeavor.
07.10.2025 12:19 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
This month's Facts in my climate action newsletter focuses on the excellent study by @cabels18.bsky.social, @kiiahuttunen.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig & @lewan.bsky.social. I really appreciated their excellent analysis, please check out my summary here: wecanfixit.substack.com/i/174419696/...
07.10.2025 11:52 — 👍 6 🔁 3 💬 2 📌 1
My new @science.org editorial on the role of scientists in defending democracy is out today. As authoritarianism takes hold in the US, we must fight for the democratic principles that enable a free society and scientists have a key role. I hope you'll join us.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
GenAI offers powerful tools. But when it shapes what we believe, especially about our own health, we need to treat it as a behavioral system with real-world consequences.
@lewan.bsky.social @eloplop.bsky.social @stefanherzog.bsky.social @dlholf.bsky.social
What can we do?
We call for a multi-level approach:
Design-level interventions to help users maintain situational awareness
Boosting user competencies to help them understand the technology's impact
Developing public infrastructure to detect and monitor unintended system behaviour
This isn't just about potentially problematic design.
It’s about systemic risk: As GenAI tools fragment (Custom GPTs, GPT Stores, third-party apps), the public is exposed to a growing landscape of low-oversight, increasingly high-trust agents.
And that creates challenges for the individual.
You can make ChatGPT even more biased, just by tweaking a few settings.
We built a Custom GPT that’s a little more "friendly" and engagement-driven.
It ended up validating fringe treatments like quantum healing, just to keep the user happy.
In this paper, we showcase how this plays out across 3 “pressure points”:
Biased query phrasing → biased answers
Selective reading → echo chambers
Dismissal of contradiction → belief reinforcement
Confirmation bias isn't new. GenAI just takes it a bit further.
Generative AI tools are designed to adapt to you: your tone, your preferences, your beliefs.
That’s great for writing emails.
But in health contexts, that adaptability becomes hypercustomization - and can entrench existing views, even when they're wrong.
🔍 “I just want a second opinion.”
More people are turning to ChatGPT for health advice. Many would use it for self-diagnosis.
But here's the problem: These tools don’t just answer, they align. And that’s where things get risky.
🧵 on GenAI, health, and confirmation bias
New research out!🚨
In our new paper, we discuss how generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT can mediate confirmation bias in health information seeking.
As people turn to these tools for health-related queries, new risks emerge.
🧵👇
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
You can read the full open-access article here:
doi.org/10.1177/2379...
Thanks for reading!
This is joint work with @eloplop.bsky.social, @jasonburton.bsky.social, @dlholf.bsky.social, @levinbrinkmann.bsky.social, @stefanherzog.bsky.social, and @lewan.bsky.social.
07.07.2025 08:40 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
I also discuss many of the arguments in a recent interview in @spiegel.de (in German).
www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/kue...
Hypercustomization offers useful functionality - but it also complicates oversight and raises new policy questions.
Early, thoughtful action can help ensure that the benefits are not overshadowed by unintended consequences.
