Jan Pfänder
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janpfa.bsky.social
Jan Pfänder
@janpfa.bsky.social
180 followers 180 following 63 posts
phd student https://janpfander.github.io/
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Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social · Sep 5
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. 👇
Quasi-universal acceptance of basic science in the United States - Jan Pfänder, Lou Kerzreho, Hugo Mercier, 2025
Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This m...
doi.org
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Kids: Inspect your data (yikes)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/b...
December 3, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
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
peercommunityin.bsky.social Peer Community In @peercommunityin.bsky.social · 24d
In case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!
PCI Webinar series #13 - Simine Vazire - Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis
youtu.be
December 3, 2025 at 9:40 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
fdabl.bsky.social
🚨 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...
Title page of our paper
December 2, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
hansonmark.bsky.social
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
A chart showing the Impact Inflation of Scientific Reports is much higher than the average journal. Biology Open, the "anything technically sound" megajournal of the non-profit Company of Biologists is shown for comparison given these two journals started in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The two have different management strategies: one focuses on profit via immense publication output (SciRep), the other focuses on publishing sound science (BiolOpen).
November 28, 2025 at 7:20 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
lfoswaldo.bsky.social
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?
October 30, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Experimental participants to us
November 12, 2025 at 2:08 PM
janpfa.bsky.social
Trust in science is increasingly being studied across the globe—which is good news. However, expanding geographic coverage alone isn’t enough.

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
Redirecting
doi.org
November 25, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
dsquintana.bsky.social
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...
This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.
November 24, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
joshmccrain.bsky.social
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
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
fdabl.bsky.social
🚨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
Title page of the paper "Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate action"
November 14, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
mariusmercier.bsky.social
🎉 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?
November 13, 2025 at 5:16 PM
janpfa.bsky.social
🎉 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...
colognaviktoria.bsky.social Viktoria Cologna @colognaviktoria.bsky.social · Oct 15
Climate science is facing significant opposition in the US. Today we are launching the collaborative Strengthening Trust in Climate Scientists Megastudy 📈 Find out more and join our efforts 👇🧵
November 13, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
hansonmark.bsky.social
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/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
"For instance, randomized controlled trials could explicitly manipulate multilingualism"
November 11, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
brendannyhan.bsky.social
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...
November 6, 2025 at 1:31 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
pettertornberg.com
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.🧵
Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...
arxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
matti.vuorre.com
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
An aerial photograph of the Tilburg University campus.
October 23, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
matti.vuorre.com
Wrote a little interactive webapp for creating psyarxiv coauthorship networks, try it out: vuorre.com/psyarxiv-das...

Feedback welcome: github.com/mvuorre/psya...
psyarxiv coauthorship network from https://vuorre.com/psyarxiv-dashboard/coauthorship showing Matti Vuorre's coauthors
November 5, 2025 at 10:55 AM
janpfa.bsky.social
⏰ 1 week left to submit your intervention to strengthen trust in climate scientists in the U.S. — come join us in this megastudy!
colognaviktoria.bsky.social Viktoria Cologna @colognaviktoria.bsky.social · Oct 15
Climate science is facing significant opposition in the US. Today we are launching the collaborative Strengthening Trust in Climate Scientists Megastudy 📈 Find out more and join our efforts 👇🧵
November 4, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
This is an excellent point that generalizes.
Researchers often defend suboptimal practices by referring to future studies with better designs.

But: Why would anybody run those studies when you can just throw a bunch of variables into a regression and make sweeping "preliminary" claims?
Defences of factors associated with studies Results are exploratory or hypothesis generating Researchers might accept that limitations exist in a “factors associated with” analysis, but argue that the results give a useful initial indication of potential risk factors. Researchers might say that the results are hypothesis generating and can inform confirmatory studies with a more focused study design. But how often has an important hypothesis been generated for the first time from a “factors associated with” study, and then confirmed to be true? We have yet to identify an example. If readers can identify examples, which we would like to hear about, we wonder if these justify the waste from the large number of “factors associated with studies that are done each year.
October 28, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
marlephie.bsky.social
✨ LUCKY COINCIDENCES ✨ Have you ever come across a surprising, accidental discovery that felt meaningful and motivated you to further engage with it?
In our new paper now out in JASP (doi.org/10.1111/jasp...), we explore such serendipitous experiences in museums and beyond. 1/5 🧵
Lucky Coincidences: Experiencing Serendipity in Museums and Beyond
Serendipity is the unintentional, accidental discovery of something new or surprising that feels positive and meaningful for the individual. Four studies (N1 = 1638; N2 = 279; N3 = 520; N4 = 452) exa...
doi.org
September 22, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
carlbergstrom.com
1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.
RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
www.scrippsnews.com
August 12, 2025 at 4:48 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
colognaviktoria.bsky.social
Climate science is facing significant opposition in the US. Today we are launching the collaborative Strengthening Trust in Climate Scientists Megastudy 📈 Find out more and join our efforts 👇🧵
October 15, 2025 at 9:37 AM
janpfa.bsky.social
Help us strengthen trust in climate scientists in the US! Join our megastudy 👇
October 15, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Reposted by Jan Pfänder
jamiecummins.bsky.social
Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
arxiv.org
September 18, 2025 at 7:56 AM