xavier roberts-gaal

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)

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date): academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868 An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

We just preprinted a huge meta-meta-analysis examining the effects of exercise on cognition, memory, and executive function In short - 2239 effect sizes - extreme between-study heterogeneity - extensive publication bias - some subgroup/exercise-specific effects More below (doi.org/10.31234/osf...)

A funded PhD position in philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving. At @helsinki.fi @tint-philosophy.bsky.social #philsci jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

How and when and why do children use loopholes? Our research on this hits the Big Time*: (* Big time = SciShow, with Hank Greene) youtu.be/f7FhKywXRGk?... (original paper in question: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

The NIH has awarded a $14.2M Director’s Transformative Research Award to a team led by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist @ardemp.bskyverified.social, Prof. @liye-tsri.bsky.social and Assoc. Prof. @xinjin.bsky.social to map interoception and build the first atlas of this hidden sixth sense.

🚨 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 🧵

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...

love this really elegant paper spearheaded by Linas! one of the clearest instances of resource-rational social cognition i've seen worth a read!

💙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...

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_...

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/...

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

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-...

🔥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...

Does Moral Valence Influence the Construal of Alternative Possibilities?

Part 2 of the Freakonomics series on fraud in academic research is out. With the same people as part 1 (@briannosek.bsky.social @joesimmons.bsky.social @urisohn.bsky.social Leif Nelson, me, and Max Bazerman), plus Ivan Oransky. freakonomics.com/podcast/can-...

Inspiring words from this NASA official

How far can we trust representation analyses or mechanistic interpretations? Our new work, led by Dan Friedman shows that analyses based on simplifying the model or its representations can be misleading about how the model will behave out of distribution! arxiv.org/abs/2312.03656

Great open access textbook on experiment design! (h/t @mcxfrank.bsky.social) experimentology.io

Scientists paid large publishers over $1 billion in four years to have their studies published with open access well done, folks english.elpais.com/science-tech...

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPP 2024 The Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) invites submissions of papers to be presented at its 50th Annual Meeting to be held June 19-June 22, 2024 at Purdue University (local organizer: Corey Maley).

Our perspective paper "Machine Culture" is out in Nature Human Behavior. Free access version: rdcu.be/drzoS

this is a bloody great name for a climate report www.unep.org/resources/em...

Discussion Forum on my "Rethinking Norm Psychology", edited by @dryan149.bsky.social. 14 great commentaries by @duhe.bsky.social @evanwestra.bsky.social @kristinandrews.bsky.social @thepsychologist.bsky.social Molly Crockett, Kim Sterelny...#neuroskyence #philsky journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

Delighted to share this new preprint lead by Arthur Le Pargneux. When somebody needs to "take one for the team" (pull a late night, walk an extra mile, trudge through mud), do people think that moral responsibility falls upon whoever has the weakest bargaining position? osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/2

If you are at #SfN23, go check out the awesome work that Ata Karagoz @atabk.bsky.social is doing with me and Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social! He uses behavioral (!) and neural RSA to measure the construction of cognitive maps for planning.

ICYMI: @steveharoz.com recently made a very nice little feed that curates the most liked psyarix and bioarxiv-neuro preprints over the past week. It is a great way to find new preprints. 🧠🟦 #psychology bsky.app/profile/did:...

An intergroup contact intervention in Nigeria improved intergroup attitudes, fostered more intergroup contact, and decreased feelings of insecurity in these communities, not only for those who directly participated, but also for the wider community! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If you know any undergrads who would like to do something very adventurous next summer (experiments on learning in single cell organisms), have them get in touch with me.

New economics reproducibility project is seeking collaborators to conduct reproduction and robustness tests of published development economics findings. Contributors earn 2500 euros and co-authorship on the overall project paper. Details: www.rwi-essen.de/fileadmin/us...

Our new R package makes it easy to report the percentage of effect sizes that a given effect is larger than for a given research field. So instead of reporting a 'medium' effect, you can say something like, "we found an effect that was larger than 42% of effect sizes reported in the field"

Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities (www.amazon.com/Learning-Ima...) is coming out Nov. 14!   To celebrate, I will be posting an image and caption from each chapter over the next several days. Here’s the table of contents to start things off.