Lynda Boothroyd
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drboothroyd.bsky.social
Lynda Boothroyd
@drboothroyd.bsky.social
Cross-cultural and experimental psychologist / anthropologist.
Working on: appearance ideals, body image, sexual selection, gender, social transmission.
Working in: 🇬🇧 🇨🇴 🇳🇮🇲🇽 🇿🇼 🇨🇳
(A veces posteo en español.)
Prof @ Durham
http://www.boothlab.org
Pinned
New paper: body image intervention in rural Nicaragua!

Want to know more about body image education? Read this paper!
Want to know about LatAm body image projects? Read this paper!
Want to know how to rigorously report a pilot trial? Read this paper!

Want to know how I caught COVID that time...? 😆
Pilot trial assessing acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary effects of a body image intervention for adolescents in rural Nicaragua
School-based interventions to promote body esteem and media literacy are a cost-effective way to improve body image and foster resilience against appe…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Caroline Bird

So good! A masterclass, really, in efficiency: the essence of a sonnet in 14 words, including volta; the destabilizing yet utterly apt image; the kite string of the poem letting the title soar...
December 24, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Literally one of the reasons I’m skeptical of gAI is because I’m a historian and technology is one of the things I study, but also who looks at the recent history of Silicon Valley and trusts a single word they tell us
Hoverboards are the future, segways are the future, betamax, laser disc, Google glass is the future, 3d tvs are the future, curved screens are the future.

Like do we have to traipse through the whole graveyard of tech to get these people to understand just becauae you say it doesn't make it true.
December 24, 2025 at 2:00 AM
Not so funny fact - I once picked up a reference from a co-author without reading it. Then I re used it. Multiple times. His original context presumably got lost, I ended up using it to mean the opposite of what it actually said. The author mentioned it to me at a conference. Lesson learned!
December 21, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Journal article: “the data are available on request”

The data:
December 20, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Reliance on chatbots and proliferation of fake, fraud, and frippery academic text is creating a huge amount of labour. There’s no extra pay for it.

bsky.app/profile/cjpo...
This lengthy checking process is now a core, mind-numbing and soul destroying feature of marking of dissertations and coursework essays and the reason why our teaching team are discussing vivas and closed book exams...but hey, the tech bros promise that AI is making everything better. 😭
December 20, 2025 at 3:33 AM
This is one of those sad-laugh moments. It was a weekend of horrible news, and it ended with more, but Rob Reiner at least leaves the world with things to smile about in the midst of chaos.
This entire weekend
December 15, 2025 at 8:26 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
If you have to train students to recognize when a *university provided* resource is lying to them, maybe the university should not provide that resource.
December 12, 2025 at 10:54 AM
I guess if it's not COVID hitting my research projects, it's the US invading a neighbouring country...?

share.google/sL79Ob8Ge8SC...
Follow live: US seizes tanker near Venezuela, Trump says
The US president said the tanker was the
share.google
December 10, 2025 at 9:05 PM
There are whole articles written on how Ben Wyatt represents an ideal of positive masculinity. King of the nerds.
December 6, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Excited to get this paper published! 🌟

We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change.

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
December 4, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Streeting to next launch inquiry into “over-diagnosis” of left-handedness.

“Never used to be like this,” he insists.
December 4, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
We should note that not all the news in the last couple of days has been bad. The WI and the Girl Guides might have folded under pressure, but there's been a very encouraging legal decision today: bsky.app/profile/reac...
Maria Kelly (an engineering and HR lead at aerospace firm Leonardo UK, represented by Sex Matter’s Naomi Cunningham) challenged her employer over transgender colleagues using female toilets. She lost.
December 3, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Well congrats on a small, vocal (legal-threat-making) minority who have now stopped trans women from *checks notes* gathering in friendship with other women to do crafts, make jam, and discuss their lives and experiences.

Excellent misuse of over-simplified 'science' and intolerance...
/sarcasm
Women’s Institute will no longer accept trans women as members from April
Exclusive: CEO says decision taken with ‘utmost regret and sadness’ after supreme court ruling on definition of a woman
www.theguardian.com
December 3, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social.
Informal enquires encouraged!
www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...
Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts
Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.
www.ntu.ac.uk
December 2, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
🧵 1/ Excited to share this work from CCEs Francisco Gómez Jiménez, whose research explores gender diversity across cultures 🌍

Francisco introduces the muxes of the Istmo Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico - a remarkable example of longstanding, culturally grounded gender diversity 🏳️‍🌈
🎥👇
Testing Biological Evolutionary Patterns Amongst Muxes: A Chat with Dr. Francisco Gómez Jiménez
YouTube video by Gender Diversity Across Cultures
www.youtube.com
November 28, 2025 at 4:02 PM
So ... you'll get minimum wage minus the repayments?
November 26, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
“My parents worked hard” always strikes me as insulting to young people who are also working hard to pay extortionate rents that will likely deny them the opportunity to own their own home.
November 24, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
This is what I tell my students: the worst-case scenario isn't your code not running, it's your code running fine but doing something completely different to what you *think* it's doing.
November 23, 2025 at 7:56 PM
So my opinion on this: like with writing, I'm thinking as I'm coding. Which variables need pivoting? What am I summarising to create a plot? What's the structure of my model?

If I'm duplicating code for a new variable I use find/replace
If I need model code I want the Stackoverflow explanation too.
LLM-generated code runs or it doesn't—what truth do you need?
November 23, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Fun fact: it is very easy to skip that bit of riverside tow path by going up some steps and walking along the top of the structure to the right. I assume this picture was some kind of dare...

(I certainly not against the Wear being used to exemplify climate change of course!)

#Durham
#RiverWear
Drowning in denial: one in five homes in Reform UK heartlands faces flooding in 25 years

Even as the party rolls back climate action, Reform-controlled councils sit on some of England’s worst rising flood risks

By Nafeez Ahmed
Drowning in denial: one in five homes in Reform UK heartlands faces flooding in 25 years
Even as the party rolls back climate action, Reform-controlled councils sit on some of England’s worst rising flood risks
yorkshirebylines.co.uk
November 21, 2025 at 11:25 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
⚠️ New Postdoc or PhD position open (3 years+) ⚠️

🚩Developmental milestones across cultures 🌍

Based @leuphana.bsky.social , in collaboration with @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Please share/apply!

Link: tinyurl.com/58dsn43u
jobs-praktika-aktuell
tinyurl.com
November 19, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
This—on my former university, department, and advisor—is harrowing but required reading for all social psychologists. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
Oxford University Has Failed Women Over Harassment Concerns, Staff Say
The university has repeatedly been slow to act against male academics accused of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior, a Bloomberg investigation found.
www.bloomberg.com
November 19, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Lynda Boothroyd
Mainstream news covered the Jeffrey Epstein emails related to ppl like Trump. Today, I want to take a look at Epstein's correspondence with prominent atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss, who asked the pedophile's advice on responding to accusations of sexual assault skepchick.org/2025/11/so-i...
So I’m in the Epstein Files
Transcript: Look. I know that on this channel, I often criticize prominent people for actions that I find detestable: accepting dark money and failing to disclose it, producing propaganda for Big O…
skepchick.org
November 19, 2025 at 7:39 PM
This looks super interesting. I get frustrated by both the weird idealisation of foragers as perfect societies and the opposite simplification. Great to see a prompt for a different way of thinking.
📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...
Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation
doi.org
November 18, 2025 at 9:09 AM