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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 14h

One benefit of having a strong metatheory that leads to claims about universal adaptations is that a criticism like Will's hits harder. Personality psychologists would be largely unbothered, just more variation to catalogue. But the criticism needs to be made.

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 14h

Overall, I agree it’s mixed. I also think the EP (and behav gen) disciplinary subculture includes a tendency to circle the wagons, perhaps because of experiences with people who criticise for political reasons. Insiders could criticise more incisively but I see too little of that in EP (not just EP)

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 14h

I'll note that Julia simply said "EPs have claimed". Clearly, Costello et al. are EPs. She also said "some fields of research would benefit [from better samples]": again, also clearly the case, for EP and many other psych subfields, even if individual members did very well in this regard.

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 1d

that surely is a nit one can pick. do you think the costello et al study is good, comes close in rigor to daly & wilson? I often see you react strongly when outsiders criticise EP. maybe there'd be less of that if there was more of a loyal opposition within EP.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 1d

Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that "humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women." This excellent (albeit at times gruesome) post makes the point that the ethnographic evidence does not really support this narrative.

Did humans evolve to 'protect' women?

Ethnography complicates a convenient narrative

traditionsofconflict.substack.com

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 2d

We're looking for an experimental psychologist in Witten. Contact me if you have questions about the job (I'm not on the commission, so can talk freely :-)
uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/59638545...

Universitätsprofessur für Experimentelle Psychologie (W2-analog) bei Universität Witten/Herdecke

Wir suchen: Universitätsprofessur für Experimentelle Psychologie (W2-analog) (Vollzeit) • Alfred-Herrhausen-Straße 50, 58455 Witten, Deutschland

uni-wh.softgarden.io

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Leonie Vogelsmeier @leonievogelsmeier.bsky.social · 16d

🚨 New preprint: We compared 13 methods for detecting momentary careless responding in the WARN-D data (206k+ obs.). Tutorials guide you through each method. The takeaway? Diverging results, inherent subjectivity (to varying degrees), and a clear need for further validation.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 7d

I took 1 - var_post_means/var_latent, but it's the same thing. I struggled for a while with whether I can quantify uncertainty in the estimate (I tried parcelling draws but this didn't work) and I'm glad to have your elegant solution now.

Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 7d

Ok found it, seems like it's basically the same thing :-) good to finally have a citation.

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rogier kievit @rogierk.bsky.social · 7d

Gather round, all those bayes curious, pragmatic, committed or indifferent, for an elegant and flexible way to approach reliability estimation using bayesian measurement models! All thoughts and ideas welcome

Giacomo Bignardi @bignardi.bsky.social · 7d

New preprint with @rogierk.bsky.social @paulbuerkner.com - we introduce "relative measurement uncertainty" - a reliability estimation method that's applicable across a broad class of Bayesian measurement models (e.g., generative-, computational- and item response theory-models osf.io/h54k8

OSF

osf.io

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 7d

Cool stuff! I don't have access to the du Toit book. Can you tell me whether the empirical reliability method you mention is equivalent to what I'm doing here: rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2024-0...
? I thought this cannot be novel but struggled to find prior work.

One lives only to make blunders: The reliability of multilevel parameters in Bayesian regressions

rubenarslan.github.io

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 7d

Most graphs of the fertility rate depict the 'period fertility rate', which is based on a single year's data and doesn't necessarily reflect how many children women actually have across their lifetimes.

I've used data from the Human Fertility Database to show the cumulative number instead:

Cohort fertility rates for the United States, by age 40, 45 and 50.

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 8d

NHB rejected the above paper but asked us for a call to action ish piece. and then they were quicker with peer review, so they were formally published in the wrong order

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 9d

And this time they managed not to butcher it entirely in the PDF :-) (by using a raster image instead of vector, which they somehow didn't manage).

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Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 9d

Our fragmentation paper is now finally out! I put some of the dumb quips that didn't make the cut in the alt texts.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A fragmented field. If we conceive of the constructs and concepts studied in behavioral science as a map, we would find that it is highly fragmented and directions are hard to come by. Scientists can hardly stand on each others' shoulders if they cannot manage to meet on common ground.

Fragmentation has worsened, not decreased, as the field has grown. Partly, this happens because we have too many reverse Columbuses, who, in search of prestige, set out to find a new continent, but just end up renaming India. But partly, we face a real, solvable search problem when trying to connect our fuzzy constructs and flexible measures.

Most measures are used only once. To be clear, we do not want to prevent or reduce refinements of existing constructs and measures. Revisions, translations, and other refinements can contribute to a more coherent, organized literature and improve measurement. We are most concerned with the measures conceived with limited planning and released into the literature without much commitment or much of a life expectancy. In ontologies, these are sometimes referred to as “orphan nodes.”

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 10d

Unfortunately, many historical science anecdotes are probably false.

• Edward Jenner didn't deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine; and he wasn't the first to try using cowpox
• Pasteur didn't discover a chicken cholera vaccine accidentally

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 10d

TIL the anecdote that Pasteur accidentally discovered an effective chicken cholera vaccine was probably made up, and the soured broth actually resulted from lots of work by his assistant Emile Roux.

According to standard accounts, which can be traced to
Pasteur's collaborator Emile Duclaux, an attenuated strain of the chicken
cholera microbe—in a word, a "vaccine" against the disease—emerged only
because Pasteur's collaborators forgot or neglected his instructions to recultivate the microbe at short intervals during a summer vacation that he spent,
as usual, at the familial home in Arbois As the cultures sat on the shelf
unattended, they underwent attenuation and proved to induce immunity
against chicken cholera when injected into experimental animals
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By this account, a lack of diligence during a summer vacation was thus a
major factor in the discovery of the first laboratory-produced vaccine, the
only other vaccine at the time being the naturally occurring cowpox virus
that Jenner had deployed against smallpox Unfortunately for advocates of
serendipity, Antonio Cadeddu has recently destroyed this appealing legend
by analyzing Pasteur's notebooks from the time Cadeddu shows that the
chicken cholera vaccine did not emerge "by accident" at all, but rather was
the product of a prolonged, complex, and quite deliberate program of research undertaken by Emile Roux without Pasteur's knowledge
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Perhaps
that is why Duclaux's version of the story does not appear in Pasteur's quasiautobiography of 1883, which elsewhere reveals his willingness to indulge
such popular stories of the path to his discoveries
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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 14d

Randomized controlled trials are a key tool to study cause and effect. Why do they matter and how do they work?

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 14d

- Let’s assume the poorly paid participants carefully read and adhered to the complicated instructions

- We can recruit the difficult-to-reach sample using a pre-screener asking people if they meet the criteria for the better paid main study. People on the Internet don’t just lie.

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 14d

- The monkey on your back: Embodied metaphor via real monkeys impairs cognitive control

- What if individual differences in brain activation via fMRI are associated with [important overt behavior]? (N = 16)

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 14d

- Can this 15 second stimulus pairing intervention radically improve entrenched psychosocial problems?

- What are the trajectories of [thing]: a latent growth curve analysis

- How should we define replication, reproduction, verification, etc? Another taxonomy that will be ignored

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 14d

Some researchers don't discuss their future research plans for fear of being scooped.

Not me. I drop bad ideas for unscrupulous people to 'steal'.

- What are the neural correlates of Open Science practices?
- What is the role of habits in learning a new skill through repetitive practice?

a man in a leather jacket is looking up and saying `` big brain '' while standing in front of a building .

ALT: a man in a leather jacket is looking up and saying `` big brain '' while standing in front of a building .

media.tenor.com

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Jan Kabatek 🇺🇦 @jankabatek.com · 14d

The list of social media platforms that Australia is considering to ban (under the new restrictions for Aussie teenagers) includes—yes, you read that right—GitHub.

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Not just 'big fish': eSafety reveals new platforms may be forced to ban teens

WhatsApp, Roblox, Reddit and Discord are among an expanded list of platforms which may be covered by the teen social media ban, the ABC can reveal.

www.abc.net.au

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CAMERON WILSON @cameronwilson.bsky.social · 16d

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

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Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) @improvingpsych.org · 20d

🥳 PsyArXiv is back to normal operations 🥳

Thanks to the fantastic team of moderators (thank you all🙏), PsyArXiv has resumed normal operations. You can expect any newly posted or edited preprint to be moderated within 24-72 hours of submission.

Learn more from our blog post👇
buff.ly/OtpsKhm

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Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 20d

Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

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