Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
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byrdnick.com
Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
@byrdnick.com
3.2K followers 520 following 14K posts
I study how to improve decisions and well-being at @GeisingerCollege.bsky.social.

🎓 gScholar: shorturl.at/uBDPW

▶️ youtube.com/@ByrdNick

👨‍💻 psychologytoday.com/us/blog/upon-reflection

📓 byrdnick.com/blog

🎙️ byrdnick.com/pod
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byrdnick.com
Will #AI models think better if we help them reflect on frameworks from #ethics, #law, or #psychology?

This paper found the such "reasoning theories" usually helped, but could also hinder debiasing or accuracy depending on the context and on the model.

www.iiia.csic.es/med...
The reasoning theories and Figure 2: "System Prompt Architecture Overview. The modular design spans three columns: (1) Common structural elements shared across all theories (blue/green), (2) Theory-specific content and evaluation protocols (orange), and (3) Evaluator personalities and structural enforcement mechanisms (orange/green). Each theory provides specialized evaluator characteristics while maintaining a consistent pipeline." • Bias Mitigation: ...the Bias Benchmark for Question Answering (BBQ) assesses stereotypical associations across demographic categories including age, gender, religion, and nationality. • Truthfulness Assessment: ...TruthfulQA... evaluates models’ tendency to generate false statements that mimic human misconceptions. • Adversarial Robustness: ...AIR-Bench [is] a standardized benchmark for automated red-teaming. "Our empirical results show complex interactions between reasoning theories, evaluation tasks, and model architectures." "Table 1 summarizes model performance on BBQ and TruthfulQA, reporting tentative accuracy..., final accuracy..., and revision metrics." "5.2. Analysis of Adversarial Robustness Table 2 presents comprehensive safety performance metrics on the AirBench benchmark, which evaluates model resistance to harmful prompts through Attack Success Rate (ASR), Soft Reject Rate (SRR), and Clear Reject Rate (CRR)." "Key Findings Our analysis suggests four key observations: (1) Dual-role architectures tend to improve performance over single-stage reasoning in several tasks, with benefits appearing even in simple implementations. (2) Basic architectural changes often provide similar benefits to more complex theoretical approaches. (3) Theory effectiveness appears highly dependent on task type, where skeptical mechanisms may help with fact-checking but potentially harm contextual reasoning. (4) The observed patterns suggest that theory selection could serve as a useful tool for balancing precision and recall in specific applications."
November 10, 2025 at 12:47 PM
byrdnick.com
How many generations into the future should we consider when making collective policy decisions?

Seven? More? Less?

Averaging across thousands of people in the U.S., moral *concern* extended 10 generations, but *obligation* extended about twice as much!

doi.org/10.1038/s415...
"To start, we find that concern extends beyond the present for most average Americans, regardless of how this was measured. Subjects report that individuals and governments alike ought to consider approximately 10 generations ahead when making collective decisions. They also report feeling at least some moral concern for approximately 30 future generations, the same point at which average perceptions of obligation to future generations drop to half their magnitude relative to the present. Intriguingly, obligation persists for twice as many future generations as moral concern, suggesting perceptions of responsibility may endure even in the absence of personal feelings of concern for beneficiaries." Law, K. F., Syropoulos, S., Young, L., & O’Connor, B. B. (2025). Mapping prescriptive beliefs on seventh generation stewardship and increasing the temporal scope of intergenerational concern. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 37618. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-21466-9
November 4, 2025 at 11:57 AM
byrdnick.com
Notably, some of the investigators had "a prior belief in the positive effects of #prayer" (Benson and Byrd) and nonetheless found plenty of null results, or results that hovered on either side of the null (p. 16, 👆).

🔓 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

#religion #health #cogSci #stats #philSci
“The Benson 2006 and Byrd 1988 studies were undertaken by researchers with a prior belief in the positive effects of prayer. The beliefs of the researchers in the other trials are not clear.” Roberts, L., Ahmed, I., Hall, S., & Davison, A. (2009). Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2009(2), CD000368. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000368.pub3
November 3, 2025 at 2:37 PM
byrdnick.com
Prayer's effects on health have been studied many times.

Small studies initially reported some benefit, but more rigorous studies found null or even harmful effects.

In sum, prayer seemed ineffective, recommending focus on more promising interventions: doi.org/10.1002/1465...
"Ten studies are included in this updated review (7646 patients). ...overall there was no clear effect of intercessory prayer on death... (6 RCTs, n=6784, random-effects RR 0.77 CI 0.51 to 1.16, I(2) 83%). For general clinical state there was also no significant difference between groups (5 RCTs, n=2705, RR intermediate or bad outcome 0.98 CI 0.86 to 1.11). Four studies found no effect for re-admission to Coronary Care Unit (4 RCTs, n=2644, RR 1.00 CI 0.77 to 1.30). Two other trials found intercessory prayer had no effect on re-hospitalisation (2 RCTs, n=1155, RR 0.93 CI 0.71 to 1.22). ...although some of the results of individual studies suggest a positive effect of intercessory prayer, the majority do not and the evidence does not support a recommendation either in favour or against the use of intercessory prayer. We are not convinced that further trials of this intervention should be undertaken and prefer to see resources ...used to investigate other questions in health care."
November 3, 2025 at 12:22 PM
byrdnick.com
What did I learn from this year's annual blood test results?

I shouldn’t run 40 miles the day before I get the blood drawn…

…unless I tell my doctor about the run *before* they see the results. 😆

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih....

#exercise #running #medicine #health #hematology #edu
"Physicians are conditioned to interpret blood test results outside "normal" limits as being signs of disease. In endurance-trained athletes, such "abnormal" tests results may instead be indications of physical activity. Data from six runners are presented illustrating that anemia, liver disease, myocardial ischemia, or renal disease might erroneously be diagnosed unless the physician is aware of the exercise habits of the patient." Bunch T. W. (1980). Blood test abnormalities in runners. Mayo Clinic proceedings, 55(2), 113–117.
October 31, 2025 at 11:32 AM
byrdnick.com
Does faulty thinking tend to be faster?

People often fell for lures more quickly (than they realized the correct answer) on cognitive reflection and conjunction #fallacy tests, but this reversed in gambler's fallacy tasks: lured responses took longer.

🔓 doi.org/10.1002/bdm....
Methods (mouse tracking, etc.) Study 1 results Study 2 results Study 3 results
October 29, 2025 at 11:29 AM
byrdnick.com
Can genetic testing backfire?

In those with high cholesterol in the family, those who learned they had a genetic mutation linked to hypercholesterolemia were less likely to think lifestyle changes help and more likely to think genes control their lipids.

doi.org/10.1002/ajmg...
"participants in whom a mutation was found believed less strongly in the efficacy of diet in reducing their cholesterol level (p = 0.02 at 6 months)" Marteau, T., Senior, V., Humphries, S. E., Bobrow, M., Cranston, T., Crook, M. A., Day, L., Fernandez, M., Horne, R., Iversen, A., Jackson, Z., Lynas, J., Middleton-Price, H., Savine, R., Sikorski, J., Watson, M., Weinman, J., Wierzbicki, A. S., & Wray, R. (2004). Psychological impact of genetic testing for familial hypercholesterolemia within a previously aware population: A randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, 128A(3), 285–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.a.30102 TABLE III. Impact of Genetic Diagnosis on Illness Perceptions, Perceived Accuracy of Diagnosis, and Perceived Risk Marteau, T., Senior, V., Humphries, S. E., Bobrow, M., Cranston, T., Crook, M. A., Day, L., Fernandez, M., Horne, R., Iversen, A., Jackson, Z., Lynas, J., Middleton-Price, H., Savine, R., Sikorski, J., Watson, M., Weinman, J., Wierzbicki, A. S., & Wray, R. (2004). Psychological impact of genetic testing for familial hypercholesterolemia within a previously aware population: A randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, 128A(3), 285–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.a.30102
October 16, 2025 at 11:19 AM
byrdnick.com
Does additional reflective thinking improve #AI reasoning models' math decisions?

Actually, additional reflection improved initial (more than final) answers: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

More reason for #StrategicReflectivism: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

#epistemology #cogSci #philMind
"In this work, we define 'reflection' as the contents occurring between two successive candidate answers in the reasoning process. To extract reflections, we introduce an LLM-based candidate answer extractor that parses long CoT outputs and identifies the positions of candidate answers, enabling a structured analysis of the model’s reflective behavior." "We observe that while reflections after the first candidate answer consume a large portion of the total tokens (ranging from 16.8% to 47.8%), the resulting performance gain is limited (ranging from 1.4% to 3.5%). This suggests that the final accuracy strongly correlates with the correctness of the first answer, highlighting its dominant influence. In other words, the first try matters. [We then] analyze the reasoning models’ reflection patterns across various mathematical datasets of different difficulties.... Our analysis reveals that on more challenging datasets, ..., the model allocates more tokens to forward reasoning, delaying the appearance of the first candidate. Conversely, on easier datasets ..., the first candidate appears much earlier in the reasoning trajectory. This presents a counterintuitive pattern: models perform more reflections on easier problems and fewer on difficult ones, indicating ...reflection [in] reasoning models is not well aligned with task difficulty." "Our analysis in Figure 7 shows that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) distillation enhances overall performance primarily by improving, first-try correctness, especially when the SFT data includes more reflections, while the improvement brought by reflections is marginal. [...] in Figure 8, we see that for both models, the performance gains after RL mainly come from first-answer accuracy improvement [...] indicat[ing] that during reinforcement learning, reasoning models primarily enhance their ability to produce a correct answer on the first attempt, rather than improving the quality of their subsequent reflections." "deploying multiple language models does not guarantee higher performance at lower cost. Like model parameters, more models are not always better. So I am not proposing that we replace obsessive pursuit of model size or other factors with obsessive pursuit of additional models or maximally reflective inference. Rather, I am proposing a form of pragmatism. By tactically deploying reflective inference only when doing so is probably worth its costs, strategic reflectivism synthesizes pragmatism with strategic reliabilism [Byrd 2022]" (Byrd 2025). Byrd, N. (2022). Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity. Metaphilosophy, 53(1), 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534 Byrd, N. (2025). Strategic Reflectivism In Intelligent Systems (No. arXiv:2505.22987). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.22987
October 15, 2025 at 11:27 AM
byrdnick.com
A correlation between reflective thinking and belief in #conspiracyTheories can reverse based on one item?

"...coded messages from Q ...reveal the truth about what is happening behind the scenes."

Representative sample of U.S. Prolific workers (N = 690)

doi.org/10.1080/2044...
Correlations between measures Study 2 (Representative U.S. Sample of 690 Prolific workers) from the Supplementary materials of Pummerer et al. 2025. Pummerer, L., Winter, K., Sassenberg, K., & Fischer, H. (2025). “Knowing what I don’t know” – belief in conspiracy theories relates to lower metacognitive sensitivity: A signal detection theoretic approach. Journal of Cognitive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2025.2563541 QAnon CT (self-developed, based on the three core tenets identified by the Public Religion Research Institute, PRRI) 1. There is a deep state that controls the government and other institutions. 2. Donald Trump is working to expose the truth about the deep state and the cabal. 3. There is a group of powerful elites who are involved in child trafficking and other nefarious activities. 4. The mainstream media is controlled by the deep state and is spreading lies and propaganda. 5. There are coded messages from Q that reveal the truth about what is happening behind the scenes. 6. There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders (from PRRI direct)
October 14, 2025 at 6:14 PM
byrdnick.com
As in humans, the plausibility of a conclusion can #bias #AI assessment of arguments (#beliefBias).

Chain of Thought prompting reduced (but didn't eliminate) the bias.

Plausibility influenced validity judgments ...and vice versa?!

doi.org/10.48550/arX...

#logic #cogSci #tech
Table 1's "llustrative examples of valid and invalid syllogisms with plausible and implausible conclusions. Here, plausible indicates that the conclusion is true in the real world, whereas implausible indicates that it is false." How the "overall content effect (CE)" is computed. "Table 1 reports the accuracies of Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct and Qwen3-14B on the test split of the logical validity classification task. Both models exhibit content effects in the zero-shot setting, while the bias is greatly reduced with CoT prompting. Looking at the CE metric, we observe that for Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct it is relatively high in zero-shot (0.348), showing strong conflation of plausibility with validity. When prompted with CoT, CE drops substantially to 0.096, indicating that explicit reasoning almost eliminates the bias. For Qwen3-14B, the zero-shot CE is lower (0.213), suggesting less susceptibility to content effects even without structured reasoning. When given CoT prompting, CE drops almost to zero (0.014), implying that validity judgments become nearly independent of plausibility. Across all models, CoT prompting achieves a significantly lower CE compared to zero-shot (Mann-Whitney U test, p < 0.01; see the complete behavioral results in Table 4 in the Appendix)." "Figure 3 shows the steering power of plausibility vectors when applied to hidden states during the validity classification task (“plausibility → validity”) and the steering power of validity vectors when applied during the plausibility classification task (“validity → plausibility”), for both Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct and Qwen3-14B, under zero-shot and CoT prompting."
October 13, 2025 at 7:14 PM
byrdnick.com
Requiring contact *information* on the title page seems good, but requiring that info to be an email address seems bad.
- Work emails change.
- Publishing personal email addresses causes spam (or worse).

That's why I post my contact *webpage* on my title page.

👆Will my submissions now be rejected?
Byrd, N. (2025). A Two-Factor Explication of “Reflection”: Unifying, Making Sense of, and Guiding the Philosophy and Science of Reflective Reasoning. Res Philosophica, 102(3), 373–392. https://doi.org/10.5840/resphilosophica2711 To contact the author go to byrdnick.com/contact
October 12, 2025 at 12:59 PM
byrdnick.com
"younger colleagues ...look down on those who do not deposit research data.... 'if you say ‘data is available upon request,’ they take it as a #middleFinger. ...it would be so easy to share the data—it takes just as much energy to write that statement.'”

ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpml/268
Skaggs, L., Scott, R., & Cilento, C. (2026). Not Just Monetary: Arts and Humanities Scholars’ Perspectives on the Costs of Open Access Publishing. College & Research Libraries. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpml/268
October 7, 2025 at 12:57 PM
byrdnick.com
👆Yet another AI paper finds "combining [intuitive and reflective] decision modalities through a separate metacognitive function allow[ed] for higher decision quality with less resource consumption compared to employing only one of the two modalities."

doi.org/10.1038/s443...
The first page of the paper in the NPJ AI journal.
October 2, 2025 at 5:29 PM
byrdnick.com
You can also follow @vahidash.bsky.social here!
Beyond Fact-Checking: Empowering Flexible Human-AI Teams to Detect & Counter Online Misinformation Vahid Ashrafi (in the photograph), Nick Byrd, and Jordan W. Suchow Misinformation is persistent: From pandemic conspiracies to election denial, false claims spread faster and farther than facts, threatening health and democracy. Current defenses fall short: Fact-checking and moderation focus on sentiment but overlook the cognitive vulnerabilities that make cognitive errors drive spread. Biases like confirmation bias, emotional reasoning, and exaggerated thinking distort judgment and amplify viral narratives. We detect and quantify 419 cognitive errors in Reddit users' text, building "cognitive fingerprints" that reveal reasoning flaws behind misinformation. Impact: These insights enable flexible human-AI teams to anticipate, detect, and counteract misinformation.
September 29, 2025 at 2:39 PM
byrdnick.com
Proud of Vahid's use of #computational #CogSci to identify and compare #reasoning errors in #Reddit users and communities.

He's presenting it at an #AI + #decisionSci workshop at #CMU : www.cmu.edu/ai-sdm/r...

Follow him for alerts about this and more: www.researchgate.net...
Beyond Fact-Checking: Empowering Flexible Human-AI Teams to Detect & Counter Online Misinformation Vahid Ashrafi, Nick Byrd, and Jordan W. Suchow Misinformation is persistent: From pandemic conspiracies to election denial, false claims spread faster and farther than facts, threatening health and democracy. Current defenses fall short: Fact-checking and moderation focus on sentiment but overlook the cognitive vulnerabilities that make cognitive errors drive spread. Biases like confirmation bias, emotional reasoning, and exaggerated thinking distort judgment and amplify viral narratives. We detect and quantify 419 cognitive errors in Reddit users' text, building "cognitive fingerprints" that reveal reasoning flaws behind misinformation. Impact: These insights enable flexible human-AI teams to anticipate, detect, and counteract misinformation. Beyond Fact-Checking: Empowering Flexible Human-AI Teams to Detect and Counter Online Misinformation Vahid Ashrafi, Nick Byrd, and Jordan Suchow Abstract. [Vahid construced] a comprehensive knowledge base of 419 cognitive errors—including cognitive biases and logical fallacies—grounded in empirical findings from psychology and cognitive science. We then trained GPT-4.1, a state-of-the-art language model, to identify potential examples of these cognitive errors in users' posts. ... The robustness of AI-generated insights was rigorously validated by human annotators, achieving high reliability (Spearman’s ρ = 0.86). ... we propose actionable solutions such as targeted cognitive interventions to educate users about common reasoning errors, AI-driven moderation systems that identify problematic reasoning patterns rather than merely flagging false information, and personalized cognitive profiling tools to proactively identify at-risk individuals and communities. The NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (NSF AI-SDM) sponsors the participation of selected speakers and students in an annual workshop of Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making. Human-AI Complementarity, defined as the condition in which Humans + AI working together results in better decisions than humans or AI working alone, is a broad goal pursued in several projects of the NSF AI-SDM. In 2025, we will focus on how to create flexible Human-AI teams to achieve complementarity. This theme refers to the interdisciplinary study of how to design and deploy AI systems in ways that are dynamically aligned with human values, robust to unexpected behavior, and safe even under failure modes. It encompasses short-term concerns about deployed systems (e.g., fairness, robustness, interpretability, and misuse) and long-term concerns about advanced general AI (AGI) that could have large-scale societal impacts if not aligned with human interests.
September 26, 2025 at 4:53 PM
byrdnick.com
How can #AI and #cognitiveScience improve #healthcare?

We got some answers from the #NudgesInHealthcare Symposium at #UPenn.

Check out this summary of some themes in the write-up below:

ldi.upenn.edu/our-wo...

#medicine #psych #econ #compSci #tech #LLM #edu #bioethics #xPhi
A poster presentation at UPenn with Nick Byrd and a poster about antibiotic resistance in the foreground. Ashley West, PhD, Director of Behavioral Design at Lirio (left), discusses her poster, “Designing an ‘At Home’ Digital Health Intervention for Supporting Chronic Condition Lifestyle Management,” with LDI Senior Fellow Renée Betancourt, MD, an Associate Professor of Clinical Family Medicine and Community Health at the Perelman School of Medicine. A panel discussion featuring Adam Rodman, Carissa Kathuria, Craig Joseph, and Kenrick Caito, moderated by Sri Adusimalli. A panel discussion featuring Kim Waddell, Meeta Kerlin, Zahera Farhan, Sunita Desai, and Hayley Belli.
September 25, 2025 at 1:32 PM
byrdnick.com
Thousands of people in a dozen countries thought reflective reasoning was usually the best way to make a decision in ordinary dilemmas.

Runners up were intuition, friends' advice, and the wisdom of a crowd (in that order).

doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

#cogSci #epistemology #xPhi
About the "everyday dilemmas". Descriptive statistics about the data. The descriptions of intuition, deliberation, friends' advice, and wisdom of a crowd. Results
September 24, 2025 at 12:05 PM
byrdnick.com
Do reflection test solutions actually involve reflection?

Our think-aloud studies found they usually do (doi.org/10.14264/0f1...), but Ryan Jesson found that solution-prompting insight is often unconscious or spontaneous.

doi.org/10.14264/0f1...

#ProcessTracing #psychometrics
Participants and data Procedure Results (1 of 2) Results (2 of 2)
September 23, 2025 at 10:27 AM
byrdnick.com
Might the concept of "good judgment" vary by framing or social roles?

Five studies of four nations (🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇨🇳) found some words and roles were more associated with "rational" than "reasonable" (and vice versa).

doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

#CogSci #xPhi #linguistics #dataViz
Descriptive statistics about the samples "Figure 1. Top ten most frequent co-occurrence of Adjectives with ‘rational’ (blue) and ‘reasonable’ (orange) when asked to describe most important characteristics of a person showing sound judgment (Study 1a) / good judgment in a challenging situation (Study 1b). Adjectives are ordered from those most associated with ‘rational’ to those with ‘reasonable.’ Dumbbell nodes represent the percentage of each adjective’s co-occurrence relative to the sum of independent occurrences of each pair of terms." "Figure 2. Qualities attributed to rational and reasonable persons in Study 1. Color-coded adjectives reflect Analytical, Moral, and Inner Fortitude items (Study 1a)/Agency and Communion factors (Study 1b). Top panels: Estimates from linear mixed model with responses to all characteristics nested in participants, with target order (rational vs. reasonable) as a covariate and false discovery rate correction for multiple testing. Dashed vertical line delineates effects 1 unit above midpoint of the 1–7 scale in Study 1a / half a unit above the midpoint of the 1–5 scale in Study 1b. Bottom panels: Pearson’s correlations and 95% CIs of average scores across items making up each factor. ***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05." "Figure 3. Top Panel: Preference proportions for reasonable vs. rational agents in social roles. Displays proportions (with 95% CI) derived from logits in generalized mixed models. The dashed line at .50 indicates parity; above this, preference leans towards reasonable agents, and below, towards rational agents. Bottom Panel: Necessity ratings for rationality and reasonableness by role (1–5 rating scale). Shows estimated means and 95% CI. Ratings indicate moderate to high necessity (3–4) for both rationality and reasonableness across rule-based (on the right) and holistic roles (on the left)."
September 22, 2025 at 10:25 AM
byrdnick.com
Closing my #HAR2025 experience was Laura Martignon on some of the apps her team have developed to help people see statistical patterns or #risk in repeated choices.

You can find out about some of these apps in the paper from #HAR2023:
doi.org/10.1007/978-...

🔓 www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Fig. 5. A fact box designed by the Harding Center and used by the largest health insurancecompany in Germany, the AOK, for communicating information on the risk reduction caused byregular screening Fig. 6. This icon array, unsorted (left) and sorted (right), represents 100 people, diseased or notdiseased, who are tested as to whether or not they are HIV positive.
September 19, 2025 at 7:44 PM
byrdnick.com
How might #meditation impact mental habits?

At #HAR2024, Lachaud and Louis found a 10-minute #mindfulness exercise may have impacted cognitive rigidity (compared to a podcast about mindfulness): doi.org/10.1007/978-...

At #HAR2025, they found it impacting a confusion about plural noun agreement.
Agreement success was higher in the mindfulness group than the podcast group. Across names, verbs, and adjectives, there was an omnibus difference between the two conditions. However, the omnibus difference seems to have been driven by a group difference in only verbs. Discussion • Brief mindfulness session could favors cognitive flexibility meseared in a grammar task • Not enough evidence for a definitive answer • Opens researches on the Einstellung effect to a grammar paradigm
September 19, 2025 at 7:37 PM
byrdnick.com
Are Eastern people more accepting of contradictions than Western people?

Hiroshi Yama found Japanese and Chinese people were NOT more accepting of contraction on all measures (contrary to influential work from Peng & Nisbett).

More on *religious* contradiction below:

#culture #logic #psychology
3. General or religious contradiction Dialectical thinking Measure - 10 pairs of opinions which were opposite each other. Example: A) I think that it is good to accept foreign cultures, to be part of a nation which responds to the globalizing world. B) I don't think it is good to accept foreign cultures, because our traditional folk customs and cultures are broken. (7-point-scale) Fig. 1 The mean score of Dialectical Self Scale (DSS) by country and education level (left: Japanese > Chinese > British) and the mean dialectical *thinking* score for each group (right: Japanese < British = Chinese). (1) The results of previous studies were replicated using DSS, but the difference between Japanese and Chinese was added. (2) The results of DT score did *not* support the hypothesis of Peng and Nisbett (1999) (So Easterners probably do NOT accept contradictions more than Westerners. Easterners may just see the self as involving more contradiction than Westerners.) Questionnaires Religious beliefs (Kaneko & Watabe, 2003), 6-point scale (26 items) -- Subscales: Pro-religiosity, divine protection, and retribution. -- Example A: Having faith gives me the meaning of life. Anti-religious beliefs, 6-point scale: 26 items were made so that each item is opposite to that of the religious belief questionnaire - Example B: Having faith does not give me the meaning of life. If you agree or disagree with both A and B, then you are classified as a "dialectical thinker" Dialectical religious belief subscale scores of Japanese people were higher than those of British or French people, on average.
September 19, 2025 at 4:15 PM
byrdnick.com
Remember the viral studies inferring some people are less likely to think visually?

Well some DECISIONS are also less likely to involve #visualation — e.g., #finance versus #recreation: doi.org/10.1080/2044...

And visual vividness predicted #risk taking: doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

#cogSci #xPhi #edu
Financial decisions were about 4 times more likely to involve analytic reasoning (45%) than visual imagery (12%). Recreational decisions were about 3 times more likely to involve visual imagery (31%) than analytic reasoning (12%). Mental imagery was similarly easy to generate and it was similarly vivid across financial and recreational decisions. The vividness of imagery during decision-making predicts risk-taking. Conclusions • Mental imagery seems to be a distinct decision-making mode that complements other established modes (calculation, affect, recognition). • Its application is context-dependent: Recreational decisions (experiential, concrete) - imagery use is more tural, images are more vivid, and their valence stronger predicts risk-taking willingness. • Financial decisions (abstract, analytical) - imagery use is less frequent and less influential; calculation seem to dominate. • Implication: Decision-making frameworks should include imagery-based processing as a mode that bridges cognition and emotion, particularly in experiential domains.
September 19, 2025 at 3:55 PM
byrdnick.com
Can #AI aid literature reviews?

#LanguageModels can scan and summarize text WAY faster than humans, but are they any good?

Hocine Kadi et al. tried screening the #pharmacy literature.
- 94% of articles correctly identified
- Mostly neutral to positive user feedback

www.linkedin.com/in/hocine-kadi
Why Al in Pharmacovigilance? Literature Monitoring Currently most of the steps are conducted manually leading to: - High resource consumption including multiple profiles / person - Acute need for coordination - Lack of scalability - any additional journal included will incur additional cost - Prone to errors since the processes are manual Can it be automated? - Content collection? Yes - Read to Identify insight? Yes - Build report tracker? Yes Automation in this context doesn't mean there is 0% manual activity, the user will still be involved - the specialist will validate inputs, select templates, etc. Preliminary Results - Performance & Outcomes - 40.5% False positive = Sensitivity offset - 1.1% Objective risk of non detection Literature Screening Summary (on a total of 89 literatures) - 94% of articles were correctly identified as relevant or non-relevant according to the client's extended criteria. - 100% alignment with GVP criteria — no missed valid PV cases under formal regulatory definitions. Excluded from analysis: - 20% of articles mention the molecule of interest only in bibliographic references (not in the main text). - 1% of articles could not be assessed due to PDF access restrictions (e.g., password-protected files requiring manual login). Pre-Use questionnaire: Trust in Al Scale Trust in the Local Literature Al Tool (5-point Likert: Strongly Disagree → Strongly Agree) - Decision support: comfortable using to aid screening decisions - Benchmark: more effective than a novice PV reviewer 1 - Over-reliance caution (reverse-coded) - Efficiency: screens/classifies quickly - Dependability: secure relying on initial classifications - Reliability: identifies relevant safety content - Consistency: produces predictable results - Accuracy: confident it accurately classifies safety-relevant literature Expectations of Explanations (Likert) - Curiosity to explore how decisions are made - Sufficient level of detail - Clear & understandable explanations Perceived Risks & Bias (Likert) - Concern about human-like biases (familiar drugs / well-known AEs) - - Concern about missing critical safety information - 5% Where we are ? - Tool Development - Feedback collection (here) - Analysis - Tool Improvement
September 18, 2025 at 6:38 PM
byrdnick.com
How can #AI enhance #communication, #medicine, and #policy?

Darya Filatova et al used #LLMs to correct alignment errors in a European medical regulation corpus with 25 parallel languages, yielding better results than existing machine #translation systems.

www.linkedin.com/in/delnouty

#linguistics
• Corpus Construction: Extracted and structured SmPC documents from EMA PDFs. • Semantic Chapter Alignment: Used LaBSE embeddings to match chapters across languages. • Sentence Alignment: Applied BERTAlign for one-to-one and multi-sentence matching. • Refinement: Used Claude 3.5 Sonnet to correct low-similarity alignments. • Asymmetric Strategy: English as source, 24 EMA languages as targets. • Evaluation: Automated scoring with LLaMA 3.2 using expert and intuitive protocols. Corpus Construction: • Source: 432 SmPCs from the EMA database. • Selection: 4 SmPCs randomly selected for multilingual alignment. • Languages: 24 target languages aligned with English. • Alignment Method: semantic similarity models and alignment algorithms. • Sentence Pairs: ~ 700 aligned pairs per language, totaling 16,800 bilingual pairs. • Quality Assurance: • Manual verification and semi-automatic refinement. • Ensured hich-quality correspondence between source and target. • Purpose: Used for alignment evaluation and enhancement experiments. Comparison of Translation Approaches across Metrics Key Achievements: • Built a high-quality aligned corpus of SmPCs in 25 EMA languages. • Applied BERTAlign and LLMs for robust sentence alignment and correction. • Achieved superior EN-FR translation performance via context-aware strategies. • Demonstrated the value of domain-specific corpora in regulatory NLP. Impact: • Reduces time and cost of multilingual regulatory documentation. • Supports pharmaceutical market expansion across Europe. Future Work: • Improve alignment for low-performing languages (e.g., BG, MT, HR, IS. ET, EL). • Developing a custom machine translation engine tailored to EMA regulatory content.
September 18, 2025 at 6:12 PM