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Reposted by xavier roberts-gaal

Steve Rathje @steverathje.bsky.social · 7d

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15d

i LOVED getting over it! will check out :)

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Eric Mandelbaum @ericman.bsky.social · 15d

My friends @foddy.net and @gcuzzillo.bsky.social's game @babystepsgame.bsky.social came out today and it looks amazing. @foddy.net is an artist and philosopher in the truest sense of the words, who just happens to be using video games as his medium at the moment: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/a...

When You Fall on Your Face, a Philosophical Designer Succeeds

www.nytimes.com

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 21d

love this really elegant paper spearheaded by Linas!

one of the clearest instances of resource-rational social cognition i've seen

worth a read!

Linas Nasvytis @linasnasvytis.bsky.social · 21d

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard!

Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it?

We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

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Haneul Jang @haneuljang.bsky.social · 24d

💙New paper!💙

How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society?

With @danielredhead.bsky.social
we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society

Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

academic.oup.com

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 23d

out now in Open Mind: "People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior"

by Bigelow & me

Paper: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

OSF: osf.io/yzbrq/?view_...

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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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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

good timing!

Also check out this paper by Jonathan de Quidt, Johannes Haushofer, and Christopher Roth deriving bounds for demand effects in the dictator game (here, we directly replicate their "weak" demand cue in a different sample) www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

yes, thanks for your interest! the preprint is here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

(i never know whether the algorithm penalizes threads with a link in the first post)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

haha, well, at least 4% of people say shape-shifting lizards control the govt.

Also, some great work by Seetahul and Greitemeyer suggests that participants are more likely to react when they think studies will counteract their interests (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....)

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

One thing we can't rule out: a mixture of demand compliance AND reactance in the same person (i.e., feeling pulled in both directions). But I'm not sure what kind of experiment could test this easily. A straightforward within-subjects design could be subject to concerns of "meta demand."

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

We also don't see a very sharp difference in the standard deviations in both demand conditions (which we'd expect if we have reacters and compliers). Distributions look pretty similar.

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

Good point! We address this in study 3 (p. 27), where we fit a mixture model testing for latent classes of compliers and reacters. No latent class exhibited significant evidence of a shift from zero, either in the compliance or reactance direction. The subsample which trended closest was <5% of Ps

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PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 23d

No Evidence of Experimenter Demand Effects in Three Online Psychology Experiments: https://osf.io/g6xhf

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

Thrilled to work with Lucas Woodley, @rcalcott.bsky.social, & @fierycushman.bsky.social on this project! (Also, glad that many of our causal estimates seem to be unbiased by demand.) Lots more in the paper if you’re interested: osf.io/g6xhf_v1

OSF

osf.io

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

In short: do you need to worry about experimenter demand ruining *your* online study? Based on our evidence, probably not.

That's good news for the field! As we argue, demand effects appear, at least in their simplest form, to be more phantom than menace (7/8)

meme about demand effects. Darth Maul from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is igniting his lightsaber in the Naboo palace. The top panel shows Maul igniting the first beam of his lightsaber, with the phrase (from a reviewer, in Comic Sans) "I'm worried these results may be due to demand." The bottom panel shows Maul igniting the second beam of his lightsaber (in dramatic fashion), with the text in large bold font "DEMAND EFFECTS DO NOT EXIST." (Note that we only claim demand effects in online experiments using standard paradigms are weak and/or elusive, and therefore unlikely to bias results. It is a meme :))

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

Then we measured participants' dictator game behavior, moral vignette judgments, and change in ingroup attitudes after an intervention (we used an inert subliminal priming intervention for measurement purposes).

Control and demand conditions were statistically indistinguishable! (6/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

To answer this, we used obvious ("We hypothesize...") and subtle demand manipulations ("These images are designed to make you feel more warmth toward the average [conservative/liberal]")

In each case we verified participants correctly understood study hypotheses. (5/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

...and demand effects are most often observed with small student samples or very heavy-handed cues ("You will help us if you...")

But modern psychology experiments use experienced online samples and standardized paradigms. Is demand a realistic concern in this setting? (4/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

Some background: meta-analysis (@nicholascoles.bsky.social, Morgan Wyatt, & Michael C. Frank) and prior large-scale studies using economic games (@jondequidt.bsky.social, @johanneshaushofer.com, & Christopher Roth) find small though inconsistent demand effects... (3/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

In three preregistered studies (N=2,254), we revealed the study’s hypothesis. Participants’ beliefs changed but their behavior didn’t.

In other words, in a dictator game, a moral vignette, and an attitudes intervention, we created experimenter demand but it had no effect! (2/8)

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 23d

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

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Mark Shuquan Chen @markschen.bsky.social · 29d

My website is official 🙌 Excited to share that I am interested in reviewing applications for Harvard’s Clinical Science PhD program this fall as I look for the first student to join my lab! I appreciate it if you can share with your network :)
psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mark-...

Mark Chen | Department of Psychology

psychology.fas.harvard.edu

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Alex Wiegmann @alexwiegmann.bsky.social · May 20

🔥Exciting news in experimental philosophy🔥
Very happy to announce that there will be soon a new journal named “Experimental Philosophy”.
It will be open access, free of charge for authors and follow all Open Science principles.

Editors and Editorial Board below.

More information coming soon...

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · May 20

grateful for the chance to collaborate with the inimitable arthur le pargneux and @fierycushman.bsky.social

check out our preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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