Ruben C. Arslan

Absolutely brutal: Over four years in review with Nature. Still published with a copy and paste error between experimental groups. Checked everything but the raw data I suppose. pubpeer.com/publications...

📣 Work with me on AI and behavioral science. I am hiring an Assistant Professor (3 years) at WU Vienna, in collaboration with my team at the MPI for Human Development. Start Jan 2027 or by arrangement. Deadline Nov 11. Please share. jobs.wu.ac.at/Assistant-Pr...

It's really true! Y_post - Y_pre ~ Z almost ALWAYS has worse precision than Y_post ~ Z + pre (compare teal "difference-in-difference" to gold "ols" in plot below)

Our scale search machine got a major update! Now with 31% more scales, 21% more items, 58% more coverage of measures by use, and 100% more goth!

After 12,000+ user interactions, we're releasing the first major update of Synthometricon (formerly SynthNet, with @anniria.bsky.social and @ruben.the100.ci ) 🧵 Try it here search.synth-science.org

Our chair and a few replicators investigated a paper about elite footballers. And missed the bigger story. An independent researcher showed us what we had failed to see. This is I4R’s CRAVE–football investigation. It starts with a PNAS paper. #CRAVEFiles

”Using vibe-coded, unvalidated forensic meta-science tools to evaluate the trustworthiness of published research risks holding authors vs. tools to unequal standards. The solution is less vibe-coding and more validation.”

The new issue of Works in Progress not only looks pretty, it also contains a letter to the editor I wrote ✍️ Looking forward to reading the whole thing!

Currently, a diagram is making the rounds that is claimed to show a significant reduction in Russian disinformation bot activity after Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers. There is no evidence that this plot shows real data. I suspect that this image is AI-generated.

🎓 We‘re searching for a Full Professor of Computational Social Science - very much looking forward to your applications 🤩 Feel free to reach out to me for any questions! jobs.rptu.de/jobposting/0...

Still upset about that highly cited paper in Psych Science you consider deeply flawed? Now is your time to shine ✨

Another special issue at Psych Science! We invite “submissions that advance the field through critical appraisal of articles previously published by Psychological Science” Please share! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

This looks super interesting 👀 I had read about the idea that certain genetic variants contribute to both fertility and breast cancer. Seems like the data don’t support that (which tbh I don’t find that surprising)

Can we switch off diseases? siRNA drugs are, in my view and @jacobtref.bsky.social’s too, one of the most exciting developments in medicine. So we decided to do an episode!

When it closed, the server was opened to reveal a little man who took a bow.

📣 Delighted to share that I have joined WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) as Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Science. Announcements for at least one postdoc-level position will follow soon. Please reach out if you are interested.

Increasingly feels like 60% of my time is 'logging into systems', and 60% of my inbox is made up of verification codes from logging into systems.

Hayes has been banging this drum about idionomic analyses for 6+ years, with folk like @jamiecummins.bsky.social pointing out that its reinventing-the-wheel-but-worse for just as long. My experience is that the ACT community is insufficiently interested and aware of existing methods+stats work.

Germany has cancelled funding for the German Cochrane Foundation. Bad news all around. Cochrane’s benefit to cost ratio is huge. @cochrane.org www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/wark...

Happy Friday! Iʼve created a game for you to play! Will AI cure all diseases in 10 years? Inspired by bottlenecks discourse, I created a game to help build your intuitions. Play it here: game.clinicaltrialsabundance.blog Naturally, it’s bottle-themed with bubbles and there are leaderboards too.

lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

The paper was led by the excellent doctoral student Abby Person, who has a hilariously fake-sounding name when using her first and middle initials with her last name.

The findings in one figure: nearly every article included all three types of generalizability claims.

New paper! Despite qualitative researchers claiming that generalizability is not a goal, their published work does indeed contain generalizable claims. We document this and provide recommendations for how all researchers can better calibrate their generalizability claims. doi.org/10.1177/2515...

New from my lab! So, you've heard that habituation during exposure doesn't predict overall treatment change. Emotional processing theory must be wrong and we need a new theory. But... what if the measurement of habituation was unreliable? Free for 50 days link: authors.elsevier.com/c/1noIo39qZA...

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

found at ucsf

No ground truth, no witnesses. Uh. Yeah. [Verse] Roll up on the dataset, don't standardize a thing, Raw units, mixed scales, let the big variable be king. Pick my k in advance 'cause I already know the story, Three clusters in the grant, so it's three, that's the glory. - Clusta Rhymes

This is very misleading. The effect size for treatment of .30 is a Cohen's d from RCTs, i.e. causal. The effect size for alliance is a Pearson's r of .30 (more like .6 expressed as d) and massively subject to confounding and reverse causation. So, this is not at all comparing like with like.

Now published online at AMPPS: Our (me and Andrew Gelman) reply to the response by Aungle et al. to our comment on the Aungle & Langer article. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Relatedly, we really need a standard name for each stage of the comment–reply sequence!

New preprint: population-representative norms for the PID-5 and its short forms (PID-5-SF, PID-5-BF, PID5BF+M), conditional on age and gender, for the German population. With @andrekerber.bsky.social, Christoph Kemper & Katharina Weweck. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hi, I'd like to apply for the lifetime achievement award. Although my chronological age would seemingly render me ineligible, my biological age? Firmly in the eligibility window. How old do I feel (subjective age)? I'm at death's door. Thank you for your consideration

Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

I’ve been quiet on social media lately, but today I’m launching Audit Clinical Evidence (ACE), an initiative I’ve been developing over the past year. Take a look: AuditClinicalEvidence.org

Separately, the author of the retracted article has written a book called "100 Ways to Future-Proof Your Brain" which she claims has sold over 100k copies. This would be remarkable given its negative reviews www.goodreads.com/book/show/23...

Article now retracted. Retraction notice focuses on data sharing, but doesn't mention - the ethics review body is the author's own company - the tech used to to collect the data by intercepting users' LLM prompts does not exist ht @grinschglsandra.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

I'm having a similar experience, although have only received a few emails like this so far. Some are so stingy about tokens that they don't start trying to check the work unless I confirm it's eligible for a reward.

This is a wild story, but I also like the idea that if we declare bounties on the right things, some random guy who tells the AI “make me 50 usd make no mistakes” may lead to some good outcomes.