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Reposted by Almog Simchon

Shachar Hochman @hochmanshachar.bsky.social · Jul 14

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Jun 24

Our new #rstats embeddings tutorial is now published in Psychological Methods! Led by the one and only @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social

Louis Teitelbaum @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social · Jun 24

New conceptual review + tutorial on text embeddings out in #APA_Journals w/ @almogsi. Beginner-friendly, but experts will find spicy new takes as well. Tag a colleague who’s still counting words... #RStats #tidyverse #quanteda
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Gabriel Braun @gabrielbraun.bsky.social · Jun 9

For my first BlueSky post I want to share this freshly published paper in PNAS @pnas.org!
We show how belief and disbelief shape narrative processing in the brain, not just as opposites of a continuum, but as distinct effects, including a cool truth/belief bias.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · Jun 6

My latest column in Science went up yesterday doi.org/10.1126/scie... . I argue that “Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. 1/n

Public health suffers when those in power dismiss knowledge

“Knowledge is power”—or at least it was when Sir Francis Bacon coined this phrase in the 16th century. In today’s world, we frequently encounter a different variant of this philosophy, perhaps best de...

doi.org

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · May 21

היה הכי כיף! תודה רבה על ההזמנה 😊

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Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · Apr 18

This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Apr 10

Turns out @aroyehuns.bsky.social is here after all!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Apr 10

Only @lewan.bsky.social can distill four years of research into such an insightful 🧵. Proud to have co-authored these works and especially grateful to Segun Aroyehun for leading our latest paper. Collaborated with the fantastic team: @janalasser.bsky.social @fabiocarrella.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · Apr 10

Honest people don’t lie. Or do they? Liars aren’t honest. Or are they?
One puzzling conundrum in contemporary politics is that politicians who seem to be estranged from facts and evidence are nonetheless considered honest by their followers.
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Shachar Hochman @hochmanshachar.bsky.social · Mar 7

1/6 Hello Bluesky! 👋 Excited to join this community and share my new blog. First post: Using Bayesian hierarchical models to rescue "unreliable" cognitive tasks, with the dot-probe task as my case study. cogpsychreserve.netlify.app/posts/dotpro...

The Dot-Probe Task is Probably Fine – CogPsych Reserve

cogpsychreserve.netlify.app

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Tal Yatziv @talyatziv.bsky.social · Feb 7

We are delighted to invite applications for an open-rank, tenure-track position at the developmental psychology track within the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

For more information, follow the link:
bgu-academic-recruitment.my.site.com/Recruiters/V...

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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · Feb 6

My latest column just appeared in Science, entitled "Free speech, fact-checking, and the right to accurate information”. (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) I use one of President Trump’s first executive orders to unpack the terrain between misinformation and claims to free speech 1/n

Free speech, fact checking, and the right to accurate information

True to his campaign promises, on 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a broad range of Executive Orders, the scope of which ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” t...

www.science.org

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Feb 6

Grateful to be a coauthor on this paper led by @fabiocarrella.bsky.social , and part of this terrific team

Fabio Carrella @fabiocarrella.bsky.social · Feb 6

How politicians communicate shapes online discourse in ways we might overlook.

Our new paper shows that their choice between a fact-based (evidence-driven) and a belief-based (sincerity-driven) honesty creates a "contagion" effect, influencing how users engage and respond. ⬇️(1/8)

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Feb 1

Steve has summarized more than four years of work into this thread. Interested in microtargeting? Check it out!

Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.bsky.social · Feb 1

Does microtargeting work? The idea that people can be manipulated by political messages that are furtively tailored to their personality or other vulnerabilities has triggered much concern. But how well founded are those concerns? 1/n

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Jan 26

Our paper is finally out!

Fintan Smith (Mac Gabhann) @fintan-smith.bsky.social · Jan 26

Hyper partisan content thrives on social media, increasing affective polarisation and poisoning political discourse. Our new paper @lewan.bsky.social, @almogsi.bsky.social, Dawn Holford, just out in @commspsychol.bsky.social, finds that inoculation interventions may help us tackle the problem. 🧵

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Stefan Herzog @stefanherzog.bsky.social · Jan 23

🌟🧠💪📝
#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

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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.

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Maayan Trzewik @maayantrzewik.bsky.social · Jan 1

✨ Excited to share our new preprint! ✨
After years of work in @nivreggev.bsky.social 's SCMB lab, we proudly present the Israeli Face Database (IFD)!
Special thanks to co-leader @mayanna.bsky.social, @talmoran.bsky.social, and everyone who made this possible. 🙌

🧵 A thread:

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Sander van der Linden @profsanderlinden.bsky.social · Dec 16

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...

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Dec 10

can't say I disagree :(

Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Dec 10

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one for far too long. Outstanding work by @cabels18.bsky.social, @kiiahuttunen.bsky.social, @lewan.bsky.social and Ralph Hertwig.

Dedicated to my fellow Israelis, with a glimmer of hope that we might still manage to dodge that bullet

Dodging the autocratic bullet: enlisting behavioural science to arrest democratic backsliding | Behavioural Public Policy | Cambridge Core

Dodging the autocratic bullet: enlisting behavioural science to arrest democratic backsliding

www.cambridge.org

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Dec 9

What an amazing project. So happy to see this finally out. Kudos Inon and team!

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · Dec 9

🚨Thrilled to share our new study, led By Dr. Inon Raz, in Cerebral Cortex🚨: "The Future, Before, and After".
The ability to imagine things we haven’t done before is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. How do we do it?

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Oct 18

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for putting this together!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Oct 18

It'd be great to be added. Thanks for creating this list!

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Apr 15

The book is still a work in progress, and if you spot errors or inaccuracies, please reach out!

Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Apr 15

It is designed to cover the very specific topics I'm teaching in my course at BGU, but it should be a pretty useful resource (I hope!) for students and researchers in social sciences who do text as data in R

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Almog Simchon @almogsi.bsky.social · Apr 15

Very excited to share a new textbook I am working on (led by Louis Teitelbaum). It's called Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language, and it covers text analysis and social media research w/ example code in R ds4psych.com #css #rstats

Data Science for Psychology: Natural Language

ds4psych.com

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