Stefan Pfattheicher
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stepf.bsky.social
Stefan Pfattheicher
@stepf.bsky.social
280 followers 310 following 37 posts
Here to share The Transparent and Open Science Game: https://osf.io/t9ngd/

boredom | empathy | pro- and antisocial behavior and traits | pasta | Aarhus University
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Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Positive and negative self-esteem are two (or one?) such offenders that I cover in my blog post.

www.the100.ci/2023/06/13/d...
January 22, 2026 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
johnholbein1.bsky.social
Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life.

A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need.

Fascinating!
December 25, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
ruben.the100.ci
Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model. Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate. Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains. Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.
December 18, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
profsanderlinden.bsky.social
New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Mapping the online manipulation economy
A market perspective on digital manipulation may help improve online trust and safety
www.science.org
December 11, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
ianhussey.mmmdata.io
Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities
Achal Agrawal is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.
www.nature.com
December 9, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
schildchristoph.bsky.social
🚨STOP, replication time!🚨
Does Feeling “Right” Make the Good More Good (and the Bad More Bad)?
Achar & Lee found that when people experience regulatory fit, moral predispositions get amplified—moral folks act more moral, less moral folks act less moral. Big, exciting claim!
December 9, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
jbenmenachem.com
Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪
Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS
Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...
www.pnas.org
December 8, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
kascigala.bsky.social
Does “feeling right”—that is, experiencing regulatory fit—lead us to act more in line with our moral preferences?

With @schildchristoph.bsky.social and @stepf.bsky.social, we conducted a series of the first large-scale, independent close replications in the field of regulatory fit.
December 5, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
snowden.st
Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.
chart of child mortality in history, roughly 48% for all societies across the globe…until the 20th century, where it plummets to 4%
December 2, 2025 at 5:00 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
merriam-webster.com
"We will call the 12th month of the year 'December'... which means 'tenth month.'"
Screenshot of SNL's George Washington sketch from 10/28/23 with Nate Bargatze
December 1, 2025 at 2:49 PM
stepf.bsky.social
Sharp analysis on why 'Why $100,000 Is the New Poor'
www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...
December 1, 2025 at 8:23 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
bjoernhommel.bsky.social
🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨
Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3
November 26, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
kaisassenberg.bsky.social
At ZPID we are searching for a tenure track assistant professor for Psychological Metascience in joint appointment with @unitrier.bsky.social preferably someone who has conducted quantitative research in metascience in psychology or related disciplines. Questions? Feel free to contact me personally.
November 26, 2025 at 10:37 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
versteegenluca.bsky.social
The only positive news about this paper is that this development may incentive social scientist to go out and talk to people again
joshmccrain.bsky.social Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · Nov 18
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 7:54 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
jnfrltackett.bsky.social
Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!!

Goodness gracious.
psyarxivbot.bsky.social PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Nov 12
When do interaction/moderation effects stabilize in linear regression?: https://osf.io/35t84
November 12, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
jdmiller.bsky.social
In our rejoinder, we argue 1) Dark terminology isn't used responsibly as BL et al. claim, 2) the term can be replaced with a more sensible and scientific one, 3) data support our position (Stanton et al., 2025), and 4) popularity ≠ importance. @davidchester.bsky.social @drlynam.bsky.social
psyarxivbot.bsky.social PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Nov 17
The 'Dark Triad' may be popular, but more importantly, it is irresponsible, moralizing, trivializing, and ultimately, replaceable: A rejoinder to Borraz-Leon, Rantala, and Jonason (2025): https://osf.io/u86th
November 17, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
celbaek.bsky.social
Proud to have signed letter from 600+ economists & inequality experts from 70 countries supporting the call for a new Independent Panel on Inequality- an Inequality IPCC- to tackle the inequality emergency- G20 leaders must support this. #G20SouthAfrica
www.independent.co.uk/news/south-a...
Top economists call on world leaders to set up an international panel on inequality
Hundreds of top economists and other experts including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are calling for the world to set up an independent international panel on income and wealth inequalit...
www.independent.co.uk
November 15, 2025 at 11:40 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
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 Stefan Pfattheicher
casperalbers.nl
Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title.

If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing.

I can tell you what I think of that for free.

www.nature.com/articles/s43...
screenshot from the paper, stating that no causal claims (like they did in the title) should be made. paper title
November 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
hudde.bsky.social
📊 now in English @fesonline.bsky.social:
Gender gap in voting behavior in Germany📊

It's about the “big picture” since 1953 & current trends 2021-2025.

The gender gap keeps growing, especially among the young.

-> Longer trends are continuing & partly accelerating.

library.fes.de/pdf-files/a-...
November 3, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
watershedlab.bsky.social
Who did this?!
A joke scientific paper with the title "Over 90% of children diagnosed with autism consumed breast milk and/or formula mileL a comprehensive cross-sectional analysis of the obvious"
November 1, 2025 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
calvinklai.bsky.social
We read the (in)famous Bem Feeling the Future JPSP paper for a "spooky" Halloween lab meeting and it was fabulous!! I couldn't get over the wild methodological issue where they type of psychic power he founded depended on what random number generator Bem used 😂
October 31, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
lcjacobs89.bsky.social
Now out in Party Politics 🎉

Our study (@jbpilet.bsky.social)suggests that when a mainstream right-wing party signals willingness to rule with the radical right, support for the radical right rises — while the mainstream gains nothing.
👉 A legitimisation effect.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
October 24, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality.

This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀

diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...
Abstract We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.
October 16, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Stefan Pfattheicher
aufdroeseler.bsky.social
ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions!

Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.
October 10, 2025 at 6:12 AM