Per Helge H. Larsen
@phlarsen.bsky.social
PhD student in developmental psychology at NTNU, researching social inequality and mental health. Broadly interested in evolution, development, cognition, emotion.
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
I strongly recommend @hugoreasoning.bsky.social's book "Not Born Yesterday" if you've been exposed to too much social psychology about irrationality in your youth. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
November 6, 2025 at 12:39 PM
I strongly recommend @hugoreasoning.bsky.social's book "Not Born Yesterday" if you've been exposed to too much social psychology about irrationality in your youth. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:
November 2, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...
Redirecting
doi.org
October 11, 2025 at 9:25 AM
In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Genes linked to sexlessness overlap with genes associated with:
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk
September 16, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Genes linked to sexlessness overlap with genes associated with:
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk
- Higher education & IQ
- Less substance use
- Higher autism & anorexia risk
- Lower ADHD, anxiety, depression & PTSD risk
"Our understanding of the stability in attachment during the first two decades of life is limited...I found little support for an early-formed prototype being responsible for stability. In sum, there was little continuity in attachment from childhood to adolescence"
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
September 17, 2025 at 3:05 PM
"Our understanding of the stability in attachment during the first two decades of life is limited...I found little support for an early-formed prototype being responsible for stability. In sum, there was little continuity in attachment from childhood to adolescence"
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
"To assume that children are fashioned in such a way that their adult behavior is contingent on their experiences with their parents in the first few years of life is not just to underrate them but to underrate evolution itself."
September 16, 2025 at 7:11 PM
"To assume that children are fashioned in such a way that their adult behavior is contingent on their experiences with their parents in the first few years of life is not just to underrate them but to underrate evolution itself."
"Contrary to popular and long-standing accounts of the causes and consequences of attachment styles, we find no evidence that attachment and ideology are jointly grounded in early familial experiences."
Attachment and Political Personality are Heritable and Distinct Systems, and Both Share Genetics with Interpersonal Trust and Altruism - Behavior Genetics
The attachment and caregiving domains maintain proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that has been argued to shape people’s mental models of how relationships work...
link.springer.com
September 15, 2025 at 7:36 AM
"Contrary to popular and long-standing accounts of the causes and consequences of attachment styles, we find no evidence that attachment and ideology are jointly grounded in early familial experiences."
"As the work of Hugo Mercier and others shows, it’s really hard to change people’s minds . . . With respect to colleges and universities . . . empirical research consistently finds that students’ typically change very little over the course of their college education."
Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Culture
College plays a big role in shaping the culture of the symbolic professions... but not for the reasons most think.
musaalgharbi.substack.com
September 14, 2025 at 5:34 PM
"As the work of Hugo Mercier and others shows, it’s really hard to change people’s minds . . . With respect to colleges and universities . . . empirical research consistently finds that students’ typically change very little over the course of their college education."
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
June 11, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"The modern nature-nurture debate has been boiled down to a sterile empirical question about whether "genes" or "environment" are more important for the explanation of human differences. For almost any trait that people care about, that question has no interesting answer."
June 11, 2025 at 6:55 AM
"The modern nature-nurture debate has been boiled down to a sterile empirical question about whether "genes" or "environment" are more important for the explanation of human differences. For almost any trait that people care about, that question has no interesting answer."
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education.
Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
June 6, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education.
Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Probably the most important paper in personality psych this decade just dropped. 👀 Interesting genetic correlations between other traits (the #1 reason for GWASs on social traits IMO), and evidence of weak but non-zero assortative mating on personality.
Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
May 20, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Probably the most important paper in personality psych this decade just dropped. 👀 Interesting genetic correlations between other traits (the #1 reason for GWASs on social traits IMO), and evidence of weak but non-zero assortative mating on personality.
"John [...] thought awakening people to [the social dynamics created by our coalitional psychology] might help us—humanity—avoid some of the terrible suffering our coalitional instincts cause. Unfortunately, he ran out of time."
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
May 18, 2025 at 7:42 PM
"John [...] thought awakening people to [the social dynamics created by our coalitional psychology] might help us—humanity—avoid some of the terrible suffering our coalitional instincts cause. Unfortunately, he ran out of time."
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Does anyone know of useful literature on "adjusting for confounds" in statistical models? I put it in scare quotes because I am often unconvinced that the methods commonly used actually achieve that...
April 14, 2025 at 8:38 AM
Does anyone know of useful literature on "adjusting for confounds" in statistical models? I put it in scare quotes because I am often unconvinced that the methods commonly used actually achieve that...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
🚨 Big question, big paper! Why does educational inequality run in families?
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵
April 13, 2025 at 8:23 AM
🚨 Big question, big paper! Why does educational inequality run in families?
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵
The parent-child education link (r = .31) is often seen as purely environmental.
From 569k kids, we decomposed it:
🧬 68% genetic
🏡 12% parental environment
👴 20% extended-family environment
👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
🧵
«…if such an [cross-sectional mediation] analysis is the centerpiece of an article and the authors do nothing to credibly address confounding, they are trying to sell elaborate causal storytelling based on three correlations in a trench coat.»
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
Reviewer notes: That’s a very nice mediation analysis you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
Mediation analysis has gotten a lot of flak, including classic titles such as “Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer)” (Bullock et al., 2010), “What mediation analysis can (not) ...
www.the100.ci
April 2, 2025 at 2:37 PM
«…if such an [cross-sectional mediation] analysis is the centerpiece of an article and the authors do nothing to credibly address confounding, they are trying to sell elaborate causal storytelling based on three correlations in a trench coat.»
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words!
If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
Reviewer notes: That’s a very nice mediation analysis you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
Mediation analysis has gotten a lot of flak, including classic titles such as “Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer)” (Bullock et al., 2010), “What mediation analysis can (not) ...
www.the100.ci
March 20, 2025 at 1:40 PM
New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words!
If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance.
www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...
"Since AI reduces the cost of generating misinformation to nearly zero, analysts who look at misinformation as a supply problem are very concerned. But analyzing the demand for misinformation can clarify how misinformation spreads and what interventions are likely to help."
More than 60 countries held elections this year. Many researchers and journalists claimed AI misinformation would destabilize democracies. What impact did AI really have?
We analyzed every instance of political AI use this year collected by WIRED. New essay w/@random_walker: 🧵
We analyzed every instance of political AI use this year collected by WIRED. New essay w/@random_walker: 🧵
December 17, 2024 at 10:16 AM
"Since AI reduces the cost of generating misinformation to nearly zero, analysts who look at misinformation as a supply problem are very concerned. But analyzing the demand for misinformation can clarify how misinformation spreads and what interventions are likely to help."
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
🧪 How are risk factors like parental mental illness and low education distributed across families? This cool new paper explores how couples resemble each other — both before and (even more so) after meeting. A highly recommended read for those interested in intergenerational mobility + genetics.
(1/10) Check out our new paper in Nature Communications! “Non-random mating patterns within and across education and mental and somatic health”. In the paper, we study partner similarities before they (were likely to have) met.
www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54966-9
www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54966-9
Non-random mating patterns within and across education and mental and somatic health - Nature Communications
By analyzing 187,926 Norwegian first-time parents, researchers found that partners are more similar in mental than physical health, with mental health similarity increasing over time. Educational simi...
www.nature.com
December 3, 2024 at 9:12 PM
🧪 How are risk factors like parental mental illness and low education distributed across families? This cool new paper explores how couples resemble each other — both before and (even more so) after meeting. A highly recommended read for those interested in intergenerational mobility + genetics.
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
I'm thrilled to share this work from my time at @ox.ac.uk (Department of Psychiatry), in which we investigate temporal and contemporaneous within-person associations between adolescent mental health difficulties and various aspects of the family environment 🧵
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
December 2, 2024 at 10:45 AM
I'm thrilled to share this work from my time at @ox.ac.uk (Department of Psychiatry), in which we investigate temporal and contemporaneous within-person associations between adolescent mental health difficulties and various aspects of the family environment 🧵
osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
"We observed vast cross-trait assortment for mental health conditions, indicating that individuals match on overall mental health, rather than on specific health conditions. The link with education might indicate trade-offs for overall attractiveness."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Non-random mating patterns within and across education and mental and somatic health - Nature Communications
By analyzing 187,926 Norwegian first-time parents, researchers found that partners are more similar in mental than physical health, with mental health similarity increasing over time. Educational simi...
www.nature.com
December 3, 2024 at 6:59 PM
"We observed vast cross-trait assortment for mental health conditions, indicating that individuals match on overall mental health, rather than on specific health conditions. The link with education might indicate trade-offs for overall attractiveness."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
Yesterday I gave a talk at @imprs-life.bsky.social in Berlin on how siblings shape our personalities. It was a lot of fun to talk about my substantive work for a change!
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk
November 29, 2024 at 8:06 AM
Yesterday I gave a talk at @imprs-life.bsky.social in Berlin on how siblings shape our personalities. It was a lot of fun to talk about my substantive work for a change!
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk
Slides, in case you're curious: osf.io/xepmk
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
I’m looking for psychology papers that use a rigorous causal inference approach with observational data. I’d like to find some great examples to showcase in my teaching.
Any recommendations?
#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Any recommendations?
#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci
November 28, 2024 at 11:28 AM
I’m looking for psychology papers that use a rigorous causal inference approach with observational data. I’d like to find some great examples to showcase in my teaching.
Any recommendations?
#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Any recommendations?
#stats
@rmcelreath.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
A large scale effort to replicate evidence that infants prefer prosocial agents suggests that infants don't consistently prefer prosocial agents. This is progress. Science is hard.
The Manybabies4 paper is out! Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1000 babies tested in 37 labs; "Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition"
Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluatio...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
November 27, 2024 at 10:22 PM
A large scale effort to replicate evidence that infants prefer prosocial agents suggests that infants don't consistently prefer prosocial agents. This is progress. Science is hard.
Reposted by Per Helge H. Larsen
New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter
Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter
No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Disadvantageous inequity aversion (IA), a negative response to receiving less than
others, is a key building block of the human sense of fairness. While some theorize
that IA is shared by species acro...
royalsocietypublishing.org
November 27, 2024 at 8:13 PM
New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter
Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter