Mubashir Sultan
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msultan.bsky.social
Mubashir Sultan
@msultan.bsky.social
170 followers 190 following 17 posts
PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute (ARC) studying misinformation, decision-making, and social media.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
caulfieldtim.bsky.social
Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Adolescents = changes that "can increase vulnerability to misinformation through social influence, emotional manipulation and cognitive biases..."
Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents - Nature Human Behaviour
Adolescents are especially vulnerable to misinformation but also possess unique strengths. This Perspective outlines a forward-looking research agenda to understand these vulnerabilities and foster re...
www.nature.com
November 16, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
caulfieldtim.bsky.social
How adolescents can become resilient to digital misinformation www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

"Teenagers tend to respond more strongly to emotional messages than adults do.

Misinformation often takes advantage of this by using emotions such as fear, anger or outrage to spread quickly."
How Adolescents Can Become Resilient to Digital Misinformation
Young people are particularly susceptible to misleading information on social media. Yet insights from developmental psychology show that they also have unique strengths to build resilience. In new re...
www.universiteitleiden.nl
November 18, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
christophvoelter.bsky.social
Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.

All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏
Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
www.eva.mpg.de
November 13, 2025 at 8:32 AM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
stefanherzog.bsky.social
🌟🧠💪📝
#BOOSTING: Empowering citizens with behavioral science

New, freely available paper in Annual Review of Psychology.
PDF: tinyurl.com/boosting2025

For more: scienceofboosting.org

@arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social

@annualreviews.bsky.social
#policy #behavioralscience

1/ 🧵👇
The image is the cover page of an article from the "Annual Review of Psychology" titled "Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science" by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig. It features a brief abstract, keywords, and publication details. The abstract outlines the concept of "boosting" as a behavioral public policy that emphasizes empowering individuals to make informed decisions, in contrast to "nudging," which subtly steers behavior. The abstract reads: Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people's agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches. List with summary points: 1. Behavioral public policy garnered widespread attention with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. 2. Criticisms of nudging include that it does not promote agency and competences and that it relies—overly optimistically—on the presence of benevolent choice architects. 3. The proliferation of environments threatening people's autonomy, the slow pace of systemic approaches to tackling societal issues, and the intrinsic benefits of empowerment make empowering citizens an indispensable objective of behavioral public policy. 4. Boosting is a behavioral public policy approach to empowerment grounded in evidence from behavioral science that shows that humans’ boundedly rational decision making is not as flawed as the nudging approach assumes. 5. Boosts are interventions that improve people's competencies to make informed choices that conform to their goals, preferences, and desires. 6. In self-nudging boosts, people learn to use architectural changes in their proximate choice environment to regulate their own behavior—that is, they are empowered to adapt their own choice environments. 7. There are boosts to foster core competences in many domains, including finance, online environments, and health, as well as broader, overarching areas, such as motivation, risk, and judgment and decision making. Boosts should be part of a policy mix that also includes system-level approaches. 8. When implementing boosts, policy makers need to avoid the trap of individualizing responsibility and to be mindful that, due to differences in cognition and motivation, inequalities in the desirable effects across boosted individuals may emerge.
January 23, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
kevinetiede.bsky.social
New year, new research: In our latest paper published in JEP:LMC, my co-authors Thorsten Pachur, Wolfgang Gaissmaier and I answer the question: “Is there a description–experience gap in choices between a described and an experienced option?” (psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...)
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
January 8, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
chrisbail.bsky.social
Cool post-doc with @janalasser.bsky.social : jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/a122...
Universität Graz
jobs.uni-graz.at
January 3, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
lewan.bsky.social
I created this starter pack of researchers based in Europe who study misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. I suspect this list will grow -- get in touch with suggestions go.bsky.app/36RdG8Z
November 16, 2024 at 6:10 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
abeba.bsky.social
academics from poorer backgrounds are:
-severely underrepresented
-more likely to not publish
-have outstanding publication records
-introduce more novel scientific concepts, but less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations & awards
www.nber.org/papers/w33289
Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
www.nber.org
December 24, 2024 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
sebstier.bsky.social
We’re hiring a Team Lead at the GESIS Computational Social Science department 🌐
Passionate about open science & innovative methods for digital behavioral data? Join us to shape the future of CSS! 💻📊

❓ Questions? Contact me via DM or mail
👉 Job ad: www.hidden-professionals.de/HPv3.Jobs/ge...
Senior Researcher & Team Lead for Transparent Social Analytics and Open Science
GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences is an internationally active research institute, funded by federal and state governments and member of the Leibniz Association. Starting as soon as po...
www.hidden-professionals.de
December 4, 2024 at 10:41 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
lorenzspreen.bsky.social
youtu.be/dmrAI3yIhxk?...
Gefährden Deepfakes die Demokratie? 🫥 | Faktencheck mit Dr. Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
YouTube video by TU Dresden entdecken
youtu.be
December 20, 2024 at 7:37 PM
msultan.bsky.social
Check out @fstock.bsky.social's new study--a cross-cultural study on preferences to control one's online environment!
fstock.bsky.social Friederike Stock @fstock.bsky.social · Dec 17
People in 26 countries prefer more control over their online environment



In a conjoint study (N = 11,868), we explored preferences for regulating online environments by examining binary choices between different regulation scenarios.

Preprint:https://osf.io/preprints/osf/haqu9
December 18, 2024 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
profsanderlinden.bsky.social
In this new article in American Psychologist we respond to critics in detail and clarify two key points for the field;

(1) The prevalence of misinformation in society is substantial when properly defined.

(2) Misinformation causally impacts attitudes and behaviors.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
December 16, 2024 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
dgarcia.eu
Job announcement: Junior Professorship in Computational Social Science at the University of Konstanz.
Join us at the Center for Data and Methods! Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...
Junior Professorship (W1, non tenured) in Computational Social Science
Deadline: 7th of January 2025
stellen.uni-konstanz.de
December 10, 2024 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
shannimcg.bsky.social
We asked people in 8 countries 🇦🇷🇧🇷🇩🇪🇯🇵🇪🇸🇰🇷🇬🇧🇺🇸 how they use platforms and their views on platform governance, privacy, & misinformation. We find overall platform ambivalence - people use platforms for news & info about politics, but they're also skeptical of the information they see there. 1/
waqasejaz.bsky.social Waqas Ejaz @waqasejaz.bsky.social · Nov 28
📢In our new report, co-authored with @richardfletcher.bsky.social, @rasmuskleis.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social, we examine how people in🇦🇷🇧🇷🇩🇪🇯🇵🇪🇸🇰🇷🇬🇧🇺🇸 use platforms and their views on platform governance, privacy, & misinformation.

We find evidence of ‘platform ambivalence’, and a lot more (1/5).
December 5, 2024 at 7:11 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
benjamingetenet.fr
New study in PNAS reveals how age, analytical thinking, and political alignment shape susceptibility to online misinformation. Media literacy remains crucial in combating fake news.

#Misinformation #MediaLiteracy #Research #OnlineSafety #SocialPsychology
msultan.bsky.social Mubashir Sultan @msultan.bsky.social · Nov 15
Very happy to share that our work is now published in PNAS! 🎉 It's a systematic look into how demographic and psychological factors are associated with misinformation susceptibility. @arc-mpib.bsky.social

Thread below and can be read in full here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 17, 2024 at 8:19 AM
msultan.bsky.social
Very happy to share that our work is now published in PNAS! 🎉 It's a systematic look into how demographic and psychological factors are associated with misinformation susceptibility. @arc-mpib.bsky.social

Thread below and can be read in full here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Screenshot of the study page on the PNAS website.
November 15, 2024 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
jayvanbavel.bsky.social
Our new paper takes you Inside the funhouse mirror factory and explains how social media distorts perceptions of norms

0.1 % of users share 80% of fake news!

A tiny proportion of bad actors cause most of the problems and distort the social norms.
sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
October 7, 2024 at 7:54 PM
Reposted by Mubashir Sultan
arc-mpib.bsky.social
🚨Job Alert for Our Summer School🚨

Ein*e studentische*r Forschungsassistent*in wird für die Vorbereitung des jährlichen Summer Institutes im Juni 2025 gesucht. Angestrebter Beginn ist Februar 2025.

👇Weitere Informationen findet Ihr auf den folgenden Seiten.
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/1908772/2024...
Studentische*r Forschungsassistent*in | Forschungsbereich Adaptive Rationalität
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de
October 7, 2024 at 2:20 PM
msultan.bsky.social
Who falls for online misinformation? A meta-analysis on demographic and psychological factors impacting misinformation susceptibility.
Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
My lovely coauthors: @alantump.bsky.social Nina Ehmann, @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig, Anton Gollwitzer, @RalfKurvers 1/n
May 6, 2024 at 2:59 PM