Stephan Lewandowsky

@lewan.bsky.social

20K followers 1.9K following 4.7K posts

Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Bristol. Homepage: https://www.lewan.uk

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Stephan Lewandowsky is an Australian psychologist. He has worked in both the United States and Australia, and is currently based at the University of Bristol, UK, where he is the chair of cognitive psychology at the School of Psychological Science. His research, which originally pertained to computer simulations of people's decision-making processes, recently has focused on the public's understanding of science and why people often embrace beliefs that are sharply at odds with scientific evidence. .. more

Neuroscience 23%

Sociology 19%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 4h

I dunno but if there was an Olympics for misleading headlines, this would be a contender for the gold. Distributors "breathing a sigh of relief" because it took in £212 per cinema over the weekend? that means like 10 people on average per showing?
www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

Melania debuts at No 29 at the UK box office

Distributors breathe a sigh of relief as the documentary defies the disastrous opening many anticipated to land a screen average of £212 on its first weekend of release

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Simon L. Lewis, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andrew Scott , and 3 more Simon L. Lewis, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andrew Scott, Patrick O. Waeber, Rosie Meek, Sue Timmis

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 11h

It's rare to see how lobbyists operate. But the Epstein-Mandelson correspondence shows us what happens all the time: plutocrats and government ministers conspiring against the public interest. This is why all lobbying should be in the public domain, but despite Labour and Con promises, it's not. 🧵

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 12h

It's dangerous and irresponsible to be putting our national security in the hands of Donald Trump and not be considering alternatives to NATO.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Trump's threat to Greenland must be a wake-up call for Britain

For too long our politicians have toadied to a dangerous president

www.newstatesman.com

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

Seth Abramson @sethabramson.bsky.social · 15h

The suffering this illegal Trump-Miller scheme—executed by Noem and Lewandowski—has caused is beyond measure.

More lies ahead, once ICE invades Ohio to hunt for Haitians.

And that’s what it is: illegal, warrantless, post-apocalyptic, neo-Nazi *people hunting*. news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...

DHS Illegally Ended Venezuelan Migrant Status, 9th Cir. Says (2)

The Trump administration’s termination of humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants violated the Immigration and Nationality Act, a federal appeals court ...

news.bloomberglaw.com

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 23h

Good point. I thought it was all too quick, too undifferentiated, and too blindly passionate. Despite being a good idea in principle of course.

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

John Mashey @johnmashey.bsky.social · 1d

Agreed. You likely know (and @lewan.bsky.social certainly does) of Steve Milloy & The Advancement if Sound Science Coalition (TASSC): tobacco, fossil, etc, but followers may not:
www.desmog.com/steve-milloy/
www.desmog.com/advancement-...

Steve Milloy

Steven J. Milloy Credentials Background Steve Milloy joined the Heartland Institute’s board of directors in 2020. He previously worked as director of external policy and strategy at Murray Energy Corp...

www.desmog.com

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

Leonid Schneider @forbetterscience.bsky.social · 1d

At least I got the publisher to retract a paper by Kirkegaard and Dutton while all these Scandinavian editors didn't give a toss.
forbetterscience.com/2025/04/04/s...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Schneider Shorts 4.04.2025 – Give people the benefit of the doubt

Schneider Shorts 4.04.2025 – cancer center director in USA and university rector in Austria need to check their papers, Egyptian geniuses recycle a spectrum 12 times, with amazing corrections…

forbetterscience.com

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 1d

more tobacco parallels h/t @lewan.bsky.social

> In the 1990s Philip Morris implemented a 10-year “sound science” public relations campaign to create controversy regarding evidence that environmental toxins cause disease.

ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10....

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Nice post, It doesn't surprise me. Nothing surprises me any more.

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Of possible interest to:
@briannosek.bsky.social
@richarddmorey.bsky.social
@jbakcoleman.bsky.social
@michaelemann.bsky.social
@naomioreskes.bsky.social
@caulfieldtim.bsky.social
@jagolinzer.bsky.social
@profsanderlinden.bsky.social

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

As Dorothy Bishop put it, this is "One of those instances where the pleasure of being proved right is counteracted by the awfulness of what right is...." People deserve to be protected as much as data deserve to be open -- in a carefully managed and risk-aware way.
10/10

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

I went through the background in a recent piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
9/10

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

The original status of the data, whether open or (badly) secured, is irrelevant to the point that data can -- and will -- be abused for nefarious commercial or political purposes. After all the tobacco industry was instrumentally involved in writing open data legislation doi-org.bris.idm.ocl...
8/10

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Precisely as Dorothy Bishop and I anticipated -- with one important difference: we talked about the risk of data being open for subsequent abuse, whereas in this case the data were not open but obtained by, umm, indirect means:

7/10

Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Notwithstanding promises of confidentiality, the genetic data of 20,000 children were abused for racist pseudoscience:

6/10

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Fast forward 10 years and this example is no longer hypothetical: www.nytimes.com/2026....

5/10

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

Here are some of the slides from that talk which make this point with an hypothetical example:

4/10

Ms. Jones consents to participate in an experiment that observes the effect of WM training on IQ
Suppose Ms. Jones was black
did she realize what she consented to?
would she have given consent if she knew this could happen?
given what happened, would she ever consent again?
note that anonymity is not the issue

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

"Researchers also need control over how data is to be used if it goes beyond what participants agreed to (for example, analysis of ethnic, race or gender differences in data collected for different purposes)." I made this point during a keynote at: www.wcrif.org/confer...
3/10

5th WCRI Amsterdam (2017) - WCRIF - The World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation

The World Conferences on Research Integrity were organized to promote exchange of information and to further discussion of ways to promote research integrity

www.wcrif.org

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

The basic thrust of our piece was that "The progress of research demands transparency", but that it also demands a balanced view at the risks arising from transparency. We proposed several measures to mitigate those risks, for example by stating that:
2/10

Reposted by Michael E. Mann, Dorothy Bishop, James M. Bullock , and 2 more Michael E. Mann, Dorothy Bishop, James M. Bullock, Mark Rubin, Jonathan M. Gilligan

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 1d

🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a

1/10

Don’t let transparency
damage science
Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop explain how the research
community should protect its members from harassment, while
encouraging the openness that has become essential to science.

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky, Stephen A. Meserve

Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 1d

I wrote about how Trump’s debate stage lie of “they’re eating the pets”, a product of participatory propaganda, was mobilized into the policy that will strip the legal status away from many Haitian immigrants the week, and what that may mean for Springfield: katestarbird.substack.com/p/sensemakin...

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky

Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 1d

It's been a helluva a 36 hours for keeping track of what the Trump administration is doing in Minnesota.

Here's my Law Dork report: www.lawdork.com/p/minnesota-...

Minnesota's effort to end the surge is rejected as journalists are arrested, but pushback continues

A judge denied Minnesota's ambitious request — a day after Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested. But, in Texas, a judge orders 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his dad released.

www.lawdork.com

Reposted by Marc Lynch, Kim L. Scheppele, Elizabeth Saunders , and 9 more Marc Lynch, Kim L. Scheppele, Elizabeth Saunders, Stephan Lewandowsky, Will Jennings, Juan Cole, Laurent Pech, David R. Miller, Tom Griffin, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Colin Woodard, David Darmofal

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d

Steve Levitsky, the co-author of How Democracies Die, on the dangerous place we have reached as Trump escalates:

“Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” he said. “And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people."

Reposted by Anne Applebaum, Kim L. Scheppele, Nandita Sharma , and 33 more Anne Applebaum, Kim L. Scheppele, Nandita Sharma, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Brady, Andrew Scott, Mark D. White, Maarten Vink, Guy Grossman, Paul Goldstein, Daniel W. Drezner, Michael Kevane, Trevon D. Logan, Robert C. Richards, David R. Miller, Aaron Sojourner, Martha Albertson Fineman, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Scott A. Imberman, Michael H. Whitworth, David C. Kimball, Jason Lyall, Michael Jones‐Correa, Nancy Langston, Mark Priestley, Ann Bartow, Deborah Avant, Matthew P. McAllister, Karen O’Leary, Christina Pagel, Olivier Mannoni, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Timothy D. McBride, Dunlap, Peter Jacobs, Jesse R. Lasky

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

This is just insane. It’s only a matter of time before DHS kills another innocent person here.

(clip via MPR and @davidjbier.bsky.social on X)

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · 2d

I am in awe of the courage of these women. So much for liberal "snowflakes".

Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 2d

DHS should be embarrassed that their ICE agent hires are so soft they can’t handle being videotaped, even while masked, so they resort to pepper spraying women at close range.

And we should be proud of the Santa Barbara women who stood their ground anyway.

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Olivier Mannoni

Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 2d

Reposted by Stephan Lewandowsky, Beatriz Gallardo Paúls

Mark Jacob @markjacob.bsky.social · 2d

Fascists try to cancel TV shows they don't like.
Fascists raid a reporter's home and seize her computers.
Fascists demand that journalists use only approved sources.
Fascists arrest reporters for covering protests.
The Trump regime knows it must crush the free press before it can crush democracy.