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Nils Reimer

@reimtime.bsky.social

2.3K followers 430 following 80 posts

Social Psychologist | Intergroup Relations, Social Injustice, Social Change | Quantitative Methods | Assistant Professor @ucsb.bsky.social | he/him

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Nils Reimer @reimtime.bsky.social · May 27

With everything that's going on, I haven't been sharing much about our research. But, today, I'm happy to share that @jennrichler.bsky.social wrote about our papers on "Double Standards in Judging Collective Action" for @natrevpsychol.nature.com! rdcu.be/enhkl

Ideological alignment determines whether protest action is considered acceptable

Nature Reviews Psychology - Ideological alignment determines whether protest action is considered acceptable

urldefense.com

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 6h

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

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Brandon Woo @brandonwoo.bsky.social · 1d

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Developing Intuitions That Close Friends Know the Content of Each Other’s Minds

Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

direct.mit.edu

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Eric Shuman @ericmshuman.bsky.social · 2d

I am hoping to recruit a Ph.D. student to join the SPARC (Social Psychology of Activism, Resistance, & Change) Lab at @UVAPsyc in Fall 2026! You can find more info about my research on my website (ericshuman.com), and the program here (psychology.as.virginia.edu/social-psych...).

Home

ericshuman.com

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Rich Lucas @richlucas.bsky.social · 19d

Interested in models used to estimate lagged effects in panel data? We (@rebiweidmann.bsky.social, Hyewon Yang) have a new paper looking at patterns of stability and their implications for bias and model choice: osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/x]

OSF

osf.io

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Zoe Liberman @zoeliberman.bsky.social · 6d

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

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Dave Vanness @djvanness.bsky.social · 9d

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · 9d

30% drop year over year!

Amid visa restrictions, international freshmen enrollment plummets at UW-Madison

This year’s number of international freshmen is the lowest recorded since at least 2015.

www.jsonline.com

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Nils Reimer @reimtime.bsky.social · 10d

Congratulations!

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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 16d

I cannot tell you how grim the AI in higher ed situation is. Many of the students have completely surrendered to letting AI do their homework, badly, I might add. How do you fix this? Truly, what the hell do we do, beyond what grading can address, which isn't a solution?

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Chanel Meyers @chanelkmeyers.bsky.social · 17d

If you can't be bothered to read, why are trying to be a scientist. Baffling...

Stefan Marciniak @profmarciniak.bsky.social · 18d

Reading papers is a basic skill (and dare I say duty?) of scientists, and I include medical doctors in that group. Keeping abreast of the literature is a foundational part of our professions. There aren’t good shortcuts. In any case, reading papers regularly is fun.
arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/s...

Science journalists find ChatGPT is bad at summarizing scientific papers

LLM “tended to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity” when writing news briefs.

arstechnica.com

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Jaweed Kaleem @jaweedkaleem.bsky.social · 22d

Facing a proposed $1.2-billion fine and severe medical research grant cuts at UCLA, the University of California has not gone head-to-head with Trump in court.

So on Tuesday, groups representing more than 100,000 of its employees did.

www.latimes.com/california/s...

UC employees, not waiting on leaders, sue Trump for 'financial coercion' over UCLA cuts

University of California faculty, students and staff on Tuesday sued President Trump over a $1.2-million penalty against UCLA and federal demands over campus changes. They argued that the actions camp...

www.latimes.com

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Michael W. Kraus @mwkraus.bsky.social · 22d

I wrote a little note on awards for diversity and science:
mwkraus.medium.com/a-note-on-aw...

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Manan Ahmed @sepoy.bsky.social · 25d

Judith Butler: "It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

Opinion | When Universities Become Informants

A practice from the McCarthy era makes an ugly return.

www.chronicle.com

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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 25d

I have many thoughts about Charlie Kirk—and perhaps even more about the white elites, including some on the left, who insist we can’t hold multiple realities at once. We can. And we must.

A brief 🧵

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Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 27d

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

ggplot2 4.0.0

A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

www.tidyverse.org

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Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 28d

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025

Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

journals.sagepub.com

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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · Sep 8

Since the 1970s, the conservative legal movement has worked to re-segregate society. Sometimes they use claims of race-neutrality to achieve a specific goal (ending affirmative action). Other times they use explicit racism (mass deportation). But these tactics all serve the aim of re-segregation.

Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · Sep 8

BREAKING: The Supreme Court — over the objection of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — allows the Trump administration’s racial profiling of people working certain types of jobs in its immigration raids during litigation.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
-
No. 25A169
-
KRISTI NOEM, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, ET AL. U. PEDRO
VASQUEZ PERDOMO, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY
[September 8, 2025]
The application for stay presented to JUSTICE KAGAN and by her referred to the Court is granted. The July 11, 2025 order entered by the United States District Court for the Central District of California, case No. 2:25-cv-5605, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and
JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
In early June, the Government launched immigration enforcement raids across Los Angeles and its surrounding counties. During the raids, teams of armed and masked agents pulled up to car washes, tow yards, farms, and parks and began seizing individuals on sight, often before asking a single question.
A Federal District Court found that these raids were part of a pattern of conduct by the Government that likely violated the Fourth Amendment. Based on the evidence before it, the court held that the Government was stopping individuals based solely on four factors: (1) their apparent race or ethnicity; (2) whether they spoke Spanish or English with an accent; (3) the type of location at which they were found (such as a car wash or bus stop); and (4) the type of job they appeared to work. Concluding that stops based on these four factors alone, even when taken together, could not satisfy the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonable suspicion, the District Court temporarily enjoined the Government from continuing its pattern of unlawful mass arrests while it considered whether longer-term relief was appropriate.

Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of
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NOEM v. VASQUEZ PERDOMO
SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court's order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.

*
*
The Fourth Amendment protects every individual's constitutional right to be "free from arbitrary interference by law officers." Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S., at 878. After to-day, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation's constitutional guarantees, I dissent.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · Sep 3

📣 🚨 Yale Psychology has 3 searches this year!

Links below:

Quantitative link: apply.interfolio.com/171903
Social link: apply.interfolio.com/171989
Clinical link: apply.interfolio.com/171970

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Nils Reimer @reimtime.bsky.social · Sep 3

I'm so excited for this book!

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Morteza Dehghani @mdehghani.bsky.social · Jun 28

My new op-ed in the @nytimes.

I argue that Iranians are caught in a state of “moral paralysis,” a psychological trap set by the Islamic Republic itself. It pits two of our most sacred values against each other: liberation vs. self-determination. (1/2) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o...

Opinion | The Moral Paralysis Facing Iranians Right Now

www.nytimes.com

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Aug 20

My dept at the University of Auckland (NZ) will be hiring in social psych at the junior level this cycle. Official ad to follow

It's a big research-active dept with fun colleagues, plus you can commute to uni on a boat, paired with a pleasant walk thru Albert Park (this pic from heading home today)

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Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · Aug 31

“A racial reckoning?” New study by @amengel.bsky.social & Cindy Kam:

“Challenging the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s murder, but in ways dependent upon attitude measure and population subgroup.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A racial reckoning? racial attitudes in the wake of the
murder of George Floyd
Andrew M. Engelhardt and Cindy D. Kam

Abstract
Did George Floyd’s murder and its ensuing protests produce a racial reckoning? Conventional social-science accounts, emphasizing the stability of racial attitudes, dismiss this possibility. In contrast, we theorize
how these events may have altered Americans’ racial attitudes, in broadly progressive or in potentially countervailing ways across partisan and racial subgroups. An original content analysis of partisan media
demonstrates how the information environment framed Black Americans before and after the summer of 2020. Then we examine temporal trends using three different attitude measures: most important problem judgments, explicit favorability towards Whites versus Blacks, and implicit associations. Challenging
the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s
murder, but in ways dependent upon attitude measure and population subgroup.

Figure 1 shows four scatterplots with Lowess smoothing lines comparing Fox (gray squares, gray line) and MSNBC (black circles, black line) coverage of Black Americans in 2020, with a vertical red line marking George Floyd’s murder on May 25.

Top left (Daily Counts of Activism Frames): Both networks show a sharp spike in activism-related mentions immediately after Floyd’s murder, then declining through the year, with similar levels across Fox and MSNBC.

Top right (Daily Proportion of Mentions containing Activism Frames): The share of mentions with activism frames rises briefly after Floyd’s murder for both networks but quickly declines, with no clear partisan difference.

Bottom left (Daily Counts of Backlash Frames): Fox shows a much larger spike in backlash-related mentions (e.g., “violence,” “mob”) after May, while MSNBC increases more modestly.

Bottom right (Daily Proportion of Mentions containing Backlash Frames): From June to October, nearly half of Fox’s mentions of Black Americans include backlash frames, roughly twice the rate of MSNBC, which remains lower throughout.

Overall, the figure shows that while both networks used more activism frames immediately after Floyd’s murder, Fox emphasized backlash frames much more heavily than MSNBC in the following months.

Figure 2 shows six scatterplots with Lowess smoothing lines tracking mentions of racism or race relations as the most important problem in Gallup polls (2017–2021). Each dot is a monthly estimate, with a vertical red line marking George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.

Top row:
Full Sample: Mentions are low (under 5%) before 2020, then spike sharply in June 2020 (~16%) before falling but remaining above pre-2020 levels.

Among Whites: Similar pattern as the full sample, with a ~10-point jump in June 2020, followed by a decline but remaining elevated relative to earlier years.

Among Blacks: Higher baseline concern compared to Whites; mentions spike by ~21 points after Floyd’s murder and remain elevated through 2021.

Bottom row:
Among White Republicans: Very low pre-2020 mentions, a modest rise (~6 points) in June 2020, then rapid decline toward baseline.

Among White Independents: Clear but moderate spike in June 2020, with some persistence above baseline.

Among White Democrats: Low pre-2020 mentions, sharp June 2020 spike (~14 points), then decline but sustained higher levels through 2021.

Overall, the figure shows a sharp discontinuity after Floyd’s murder across all groups, with the most sustained increases among Black respondents and White Democrats, and weaker persistence among White Republicans.

Figure 4 presents six scatterplots of predicted weekly average IAT D-scores for 2019 (gray squares, gray line) and 2020 (black circles, black line), with a vertical red line marking George Floyd’s murder on May 25. Higher D-scores indicate stronger implicit anti-Black bias.

Top row:

Full Sample: Bias was declining before Floyd’s murder and drops further afterward in 2020, diverging from 2019.

Among Whites: A clear decline in D-scores appears after Floyd’s murder, with lower bias sustained through 2020.

Among Blacks: No sharp discontinuity; scores remain stable across 2019 and 2020.

Bottom row:

Among White Conservatives: Noticeable decline in anti-Black bias after May 2020, sustained through the year.

Among White Neutrals: A clear drop in bias after Floyd’s murder, somewhat larger than among liberals.

Among White Liberals: Small decline in bias after May 2020, though less pronounced than among conservatives or neutrals.

Overall, the figure shows that implicit anti-Black bias decreased among White respondents across ideological groups after Floyd’s murder, with larger reductions among conservatives and neutrals than liberals. Black respondents show little change, consistent with already low baseline bias.

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Whitney Ringwald @whitneyringwald.bsky.social · Aug 29

✨✨ I will be reviewing applications for the University of Minnesota psychology PhD program this fall!

Information for potential applicants can be found on my lab website: ringwaldlab.psych.umn.edu/join-lab

Please spread the word!

Join the Lab | Ringwald Lab

ringwaldlab.psych.umn.edu

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Nils Reimer @reimtime.bsky.social · Aug 27

all killer no filler

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Jin X. Goh | 吴晋勋 @jinxungoh.bsky.social · Aug 26

#Psychjobs
My former institution Colby College is hiring a tenure track in intergroup relations, broadly defined & open to many psych areas (not just social). This is my replacement line. I truly enjoyed my time at Colby and it's a great dept! Happy to answer Qs if I can.
apply.interfolio.com/172552

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