Jan Pfänder

How much do people really reject science? New paper out doi.org/10.1177/0963... In four studies, we asked Americans—including flat Earthers, climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics—whether they accepted basic scientific facts. The result? A surprisingly high level of agreement. 👇

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

1/4 🧵 New paper out (open access!) with @wimdeneys.bsky.social Can people tell a strong argument from a weak one on the fly, or only once they stop to think? We find that people already have some intuitive sensitivity to argument strength, but deliberation helps a lot.

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

Friday (July 3), 14:30, Room Dresde: @lenazohm.bsky.social shares her work on “expert trespassing” in a very cool symposium organized by @cruzf.bsky.social, incl. further talks about science reception and communication by him, @janpfa.bsky.social, and Arne Stolp. Add it to your agenda! 📋

1/ "Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. The updated version of this preprint is now online! THREAD🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

🚨Next week's talk at ARC Join us for a talk presented by Dr. Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). 📅 21 May 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online See the link for details👇 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/45727...

Updated my textbook with a cleaner lay-out, better accessibility, and eight new interactive visualizations made completely in html (such as this illustration of the positive predictive value). lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Taking a look at Castro-Schilo & Grimm about "residualized change vs diff scores" -- interesting case of how spelling out estimands affects reasoning. Estimand of interest: "effect of prior cohabitation on change in relationship satisfaction pre/post marriage"> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

My first paper is out today in Environmental Research Letters. Wildfire smoke doesn't just harm your lungs; it's also linked to violence. Using 11 years of data from Seattle, I find that smoke days see 3.6% more violent assaults. 🧵 A short thread on what was found. doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae436c

"the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper." Retraction of 2023 paper that did not use the reported variables. The replication report is astonishing www.nature.com/articles/s41... Pre-publication peer review remains undefeated in laundering bullshit

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴 Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout ! 📌 www.gallicagram.com

Breaking news: The #NCCR #CLIM+ on "Climate Extremes & Society" will be funded by the @snf-fns.ch in the coming 4 years! With 47 PIs, 20 institutions & 22 stakeholders from #health to #finance & #agriculture, it will unite climate expertise from both natural & social science! nccr-climplus.ch

What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5

Played around with Causion by @isager.bsky.social It's an impressive teaching tool for causal inference... and it also really pretty. Amazing color scheme and slick interface. Shown below a demonstration of an extended front-door DAG in Causion.

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵 regcheck.app

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Too many significance tests!! Made this little graphic for my #stats class, showing the various kinds of (N)HST and how interpreting confidence intervals can replace all of them. Made with #rstats #ggplot (duh)

Interesting megastudy on the (in)effectiveness of climate messaging: tiny effects on attitudes, no effects on donation www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Persuasiveness varied little across party lines", another win for Persuasion in Parallel @aecoppock.bsky.social

Kids: Inspect your data (yikes) www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/b...

1. Transparency is necessary for credibility 2. Transparency is hard to change 3. Require transparency* 4. Transparency is not magic 5. Journals are part of problem 6. Expect more from journals 7. Peer review is not magic 8. A crisis can look a lot like „normal“ science 9. Meta-analysis is not magic

🚨 Mapping climate change coverage In a new preprint, Simon Wimmer, @jmbh.bsky.social, and I analyzed over 50,000 articles about climate change from major German newspapers across the political spectrum (2010-2024) using large language models 🧵 🔗 Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

Scientific Reports has a ⬆️ Impact Inflation: a very high IF given their citation network (self-citing, citation cartels, etc). They'll even typeset & publish AI slop for a fee! Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Strain explorer β: pagoba.shinyapps.io/strain_explo... #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicSky

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Experimental participants to us

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

🚨Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions In a new preprint, @colognaviktoria.bsky.social, @maiensachis.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social & I examine techno-optimism among 9,199 scientists and how it relates to their civic engagement and lifestyle choices🧵 🔗 Link: tinyurl.com/hh94huzv

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

🎉 You’ve exceeded even our most optimistic expectations — we received 107 intervention proposals. THANK YOU! 🕵 Our advisory board will now begin reviewing all interventions. 🔗 More information: janpfander.github.io/trust_climat...

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

"For instance, randomized controlled trials could explicitly manipulate multilingualism"

Fascinating economics job market paper by Jens Oehlen on the effects of Enigma codebreaking and how it interacted with military/intelligence strategy jensoehlen.github.io/uploads/Enig...

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social. We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits. tiu.nu/22989

Wrote a little interactive webapp for creating psyarxiv coauthorship networks, try it out: vuorre.com/psyarxiv-das... Feedback welcome: github.com/mvuorre/psya...