Can AI ever become conscious? It will depend on whether consciousness can only arise from the electrochemical processes inherent to biological entities. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Can only meat machines be conscious?
Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient
for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations.
This view neglects a comp...
www.cell.com
Positive emotions are bouba and negative emotions are kiki. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Spiky anger, round peace: examining valence, arousal, and linguistic associations in emotion-eliciting concepts
This research examines how valence, arousal, and linguistic co-occurrence patterns influence shape-emotion associations. Across three studies, we tested whether positive and negative words are asso...
www.tandfonline.com
VCU is hiring two TT Assistant Profs in Psychology (Open area)! Please reach out to me if you have questions.
vcujobs.com/jobs/assista...
vcujobs.com/jobs/assista...
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology - VCU Main Campus, Virginia, United States
Benefits: All full-time university staff are eligible for VCU’s robust benefits package that includes comprehensive health benefits, paid annual and holiday leave granted up front, generous tuition be...
vcujobs.com
A conceptual analysis of hundreds of participants' descriptions of humiliating experiences. 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
Reposted by: David Chester
Good scientific practices get in the way of a clean narrative. A clean narrative is everything.
Adversarial collab shows conservatives are less likely to update their beliefs based on evidence than libs. Authors could not have gone more out of their way to express that these effect sizes are small, but I find them to still be of a meaningful size. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity‐of‐the‐right, symmetry thesis, or rigidity‐of‐extremes: The answer depends on the question
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationaliz....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
I love this paper so goddam much. In well-researched areas, we don't need new questionnaires. We need to take stock of what we have and refine it. 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
The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment
Moral judgment is central to both everyday life and cognitive science, but how can it be studied with quantitative precision? By far the most direct a…
www.sciencedirect.com
by Linda J. Skitka — Reposted by: David Chester
Gun-related murders are on the rise and this study implies that ***45%*** of the reason for this increase is greater depictions of gun violence in movies (but not TV, somehow). The analyses are inappropriate, the pseudo-causal inferences based on them are absurd, and this paper should be ignored.
People don't just avoid those who reject others and approach those who accept others, but they also avoid and approach their friends, respectively. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Generalization of rejection and acceptance in social networks
Social environments present opportunities for connection and resources, but they also involve the risk of rejection. How do people learn which individ…
www.sciencedirect.com
"Presenting p-curve's performance for implausible edge case, without considering performance under likely cases, is like testing cars by dropping pianos on them .. if a car failed the piano test it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) influence car-buying decisions, b/c pianos are so unlikely to fall on cars"
Reposted by: David Chester, Matti Vuorre
Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it?
datacolada.org/129
datacolada.org/129
The classic Dot Probe is trash, but this new version shows some early signs of promise as a valid behavioral measure of attentional bias to threat. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Evidence of an exponential relationship between attentional bias to threat and anxiety using an original “eye-dot-probe” task - Motivation and Emotion
Over the past decade, the anxiety-related attentional bias to threat, widely investigated through the dot-probe task, has faced challenges. Although the dominant view assumes a static attentional bias...
link.springer.com
AI recruiting AI participants to do AI-designed studies for AI-written manuscripts that are accepted to AI journals that produce AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the academics die out. That's the dead ivory tower aliens are one day going to find.
Interesting deep dive into why and how the phrase 'women and children' as victims elicits heightened moral outrage. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The moral pull of “women and children”
Victimized “women and children” are frequently featured in the media, yet the consequences of this phrase are far from clear. Across six experiments (…
www.sciencedirect.com
Expressions of outrage may undermine White people's motivations for reparative actions. 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
Reposted by: David Chester
AI HR hiring AI candidates to do AI jobs selling AI products which are advertised on AI channels producing AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the humans die out. That's the dead world aliens are one day going to find.
Makes a lotta sense if you know about sadistic folks. The fact that there is a human on the other side of their harmful comment, who is likely being hurt by it, is the whole point! Reminding them of this just increases the motivational salience of the harmful act.
by David Chester — Reposted by: William J. Brady
Attempts at reducing online aggression (ie, cruel Reddit comments) by increasing empathy (eg, "There is a human being on the other side who might be hurt by your words") tended to backfire. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Whom to pity, whom to scold? Effects of empathetic and normative AI-assisted interventions on aggressive Reddit users with different activity profiles
During a six-month experiment conducted on Reddit, we studied the impact of counter-speech interventions against personal attacks sent by 440 users re…
www.sciencedirect.com
Don't claim "full mediation". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
On Partial Versus Full Mediation and the Importance of Effect Sizes - Thomas Ledermann, Myriam Rudaz, Matthew S. Fritz, 2025
Theoretical models involving one or multiple intervening variables often posit whether a cause influences an outcome both directly and indirectly or only indire...
journals.sagepub.com
Those are good goals. Super awesome ambitious goals. But if an additional goal of yours was to be a beast, then you accomplished that goal.
We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. -Martin Amis
To test mediation in an experiment, it's not enough to just randomly assign participants to X. Manipulating both X and M is ideal, but if you can't, this paper shows you how to perform sensitivity analyses that quantify how much confounders fucked up your model. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Three Sensitivity-Analysis Methods to Assess Unmeasured Pretreatment Confounding Bias in Experimental Mediation Analysis - Diana Alvarez-Bartolo, David P. MacKinnon, 2025
Statistical-mediation analysis is a widely used method in psychological research that helps understand the intermediate variables, known as mediators (M), by wh...
journals.sagepub.com
Counter to plasticity claims, cortical representations of limbs remain remarkably stable after amputation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation - Nature Neuroscience
Longitudinal neuroimaging of participants with planned arm amputations shows that the cortical body map remains stable after amputation, with no evidence of hand or face reorganization, thus challengi...
www.nature.com
Leaving a religion predicts a subsequent increase in liberal political orientation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Religious Dones Become More Politically Liberal After Leaving Religion
Objective
Research has accumulated evidence for religious residue, or the tendency for aspects of religion to persist after de-identification. The current study sought to examine whether religious r.....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Reposted by: David Chester, Jill A. Jacobson
For those interested, here is a link to a new power paper:
Hancock, G. R., & Feng, Y. (2026). nmax and the quest to
restore caution, integrity, and practicality to the sample size planning process. Psychological Methods.
yifengquant.github.io/Publications...
Hancock, G. R., & Feng, Y. (2026). nmax and the quest to
restore caution, integrity, and practicality to the sample size planning process. Psychological Methods.
yifengquant.github.io/Publications...
