Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
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ramblecamble.bsky.social
Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
@ramblecamble.bsky.social
Social scientist and researcher | Media Cognition, Misinformation, Psychology | Research Associate for @simonoxfphys.com | he/him
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It was an honor to attend the institute this year and learn from a diverse array of experts how we can research the interplay between humans and media environments.

I cannot wait to apply these new perspectives to my current and future work!
We wrapped up the 22nd Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (@mpib-berlin.bsky.social).

ECRs from around the world joined us to share their insights on rationality, cognition, and decision-making.

1/🧵👇
Good news everyone! I've joined the sci-comm effort as a researcher for @simonoxfphys.com 🔍 Check out the first videos I've worked on below!

Stay til the end for a cameo and a link to a Nebula-exclusive interview on misinfo ✨

Reel version for the time-deprived: www.youtube.com/shorts/3FgnQ...
The future of climate denial
YouTube video by Simon Clark
www.youtube.com
November 14, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
All the more reason for universities to stand strong - the public recognizes this is a rotten deal

My message to Vanderbilt and all univs - "it is essential to reject the entire idea of trading away institutional, faculty and student freedoms for government benefits"

bsky.app/profile/lkfa...
"the results show that most Americans are not buying the White House’s arguments for the compact’s measures, said [Baker]...The compact has been presented as a tool to promote [affordability and merit]...but it’s really about censoring institutions and faculty."

www.chronicle.com/article/amer...
Americans Think Trump Is Overreaching With His Higher-Ed Compact
Most don’t want the federal government setting colleges’ policies, a new Quinnipiac poll reveals.
www.chronicle.com
October 25, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Newsletter subscribers should have it in their inbox by now news.chanda.science/archive/know...
Knowledge Is Worth Your Time
A few thoughts about why we must embrace the hard work of learning.
news.chanda.science
October 23, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
The worry here is that Meta has sent @cos.io and researchers on a years-long goose chase to identify harm, without providing the exact data they would need to find it. The risk is that the study turns out goose-eggs (nulls) owing to design bias, and Meta can cite that as evidence everything is OK.
October 20, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
They're trying to prevent the student newspaper from printing news, period. Not just a particular story.

"The Media School directed us to print no news in the paper... nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage."
Indiana University has fired the staff director of the student newspaper, after disputes in which university leadership tried to pressure him to prevent students from publishing news.
October 15, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
We need to talk about how social media algorithms push moms down a slippery slope of distrust.

From "Are my kids getting enough support in school?" To "Maybe I should homeschool." To "Maybe modern medicine is bad."

I've seen this first-hand in research I'm doing on parenting apps. 1/🧵
October 15, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States.

Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵
October 12, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Proud of my Vanderbilt colleagues for making it clear that our university should reject the proposed "Compact". As I state below - this deal is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms. (And yay to MIT for their clear rejection today!)

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
October 10, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
New from me and @brendannyhan.bsky.social

Why Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence" is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain.
Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.
www.msnbc.com
October 7, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Psychology has a generalizability problem and it is harmful at multiple levels for the science. This stems from a few issues. There is no training in how to effectively create a sampling strategy in order to generalize.
October 5, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
What Psychology doesn’t understand about sampling and selection bias-hurts our science and what we can offer to our communities from our science. This paper tries to provide some way to address some of these concerns.
October's Editor's Choice:

Improving generalizability of developmental research through increased use of homogeneous convenience samples: A Monte Carlo simulation.

Jager, Xia, Putnick, & Bornstein

psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

@apajournals.bsky.social
@putnickd.bsky.social

2/2
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
October 5, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Is this truly a no? Dartmouth clearly won't sign the version sent on Oct 1st. (I don't think any uni will). But it's vital that universities reject this approach in totality, not start a negotiation for better terms. To me, that statement leaves the door open for signing a "better" deal.
It appears that my employer, Dartmouth, one of the Trump 9, has said no to the compact. All the better given that our president is cited within it. But she’s saying no. Count the small victories when they come.
October 4, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Does anyone use #RedCap for child participant database management? If so, would you be willing to share screenshots etc. of what your user interface looks like or share the template, whichever is easier.

#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #devpsyc #AcademicSky #cogsci
October 1, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods
A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.
link.springer.com
October 1, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
"The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us."
Judge Young then proposes that maybe Americans just don't care because there aren't many immigrant Palestinians among us and Gaza is far away. He then concludes this section with a robust defense of WHY people should care about what this admin is doing, which I'm reproducing in full.

Read it all.
September 30, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...
Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
September 26, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
While I had been using rainbow parentheses for a while, I only recently found out about rainbow indentation thanks to @ijlyttle.bsky.social and @3mmarand.bsky.social 🌈 #rstats
September 25, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
The President of Texas A&M fired a lecturer & removed a dept. chair + Dean of the College because a class addressed gender. And he was still forced to resign a week later.

Capitulation buys nothing, so may as well go down swinging. Really wish our institutions of higher ed could learn the lesson.
September 19, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
former CDC official Dr. Houry: "I first learned that the secretary had changed our CDC covid vaccine guidance on an X social media post. CDC scientists have still not seen the scientific data or justification for this change. That is not gold standard science."
September 17, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
it's so funny to see America's health insurance companies be like "look. If there's one thing we love it's denying you care. but we ran the numbers - and we cannot BELIEVE we're saying this - and it's cheaper for us to just pay for the vaccines than deal with you going to the ER."
Regardless of the disgraceful nonsense we will likely hear from this administration in the coming days on vaccine “recommendations,” Americas healthcare insurers issued a joint statement tonight saying coverage for Covid and flu shots will remain unchanged from prior years.

Speaks for itself.
September 17, 2025 at 3:03 AM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
New people are signing our open letter almost everyday, and it is so heartening to see. Especially good to see familiar names sign.

openletter.earth/open-letter-...
Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia
openletter.earth
September 16, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
A nonprofit wants to turn Willa’s Books & Vinyl, a bookstore dedicated to Black history in Kansas City, Missouri, into a public archive.

Founder Willa Robinson wants young Black readers to see themselves in what they read, and she fears that such books will be banned.
Community wants to save 20,000 books after Black bookstore shuts down
The Kansas City Defender, a local news nonprofit and Black-led advocacy group, plans to reopen the 20,000-book collection to the public.
www.washingtonpost.com
September 17, 2025 at 12:00 AM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
Parents are uncertain about what to believe when it comes to false claims about vaccines and measles.

While relatively few parents believe the false claim that the MMR vaccine can cause autism, nearly half say they don’t know enough to say. https://on.kff.org/4nqSlZG
September 16, 2025 at 7:13 PM
See this is one of those solutions that makes inherent sense, but I guarantee the way it'll be implemented won't be anything approaching meta-cognition. It'll just generate the probability that the answer in their training sets included any confidence qualifiers which =/= actual discernment.
September 16, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Ian L. Campbell, Ph.D.
I'm looking for a part-time research assistant to help research and fact-check long form YouTube videos, with an emphasis on climate misinformation campaigns.

If you or someone you know would be a good fit, please check out this form! Applications close on 26/9.

forms.gle/mpyzcdjwv63C...
forms.gle
September 16, 2025 at 2:48 PM