Julia M. Rohrer
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dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Julia M. Rohrer
@dingdingpeng.the100.ci
10K followers 2.5K following 8.8K posts
Personality psych & causal inference @UniLeipzig. I like all things science, beer, & puns. Even better when combined! Part of http://the100.ci, http://openscience-leipzig.org
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dingdingpeng.the100.ci
PPS more updates! We now have a figure with an overview of the workflow, plus some other nifty additions.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 13, 2025 at 5:37 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Update: Ada asked me to write her brother’s name so finally she also has a sign to stop *him* from entering *her* bed.
A sign that says Ada and David, the latter struck through, attached to a small gate with Washi tape.
November 13, 2025 at 4:36 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
This slide unfortunately generalizes well 🥲
Slide titled: The non-experimental psych workaround - introduction: relies on a causal reading of the literature - methods & results: implicitly (but never explicitly) causal inference-y - discussion: only makes sense in terms of causality - IMPORTANT: add a paragraph that your study was only observational and no causal conclusions are warranted. future longitudinal or experimental studies will surely fix this problem.
November 11, 2025 at 9:25 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
One does not simply walk into Mordor meme, text: One does not simply manipulate multilingualism
November 11, 2025 at 8:30 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
It's this friendly fellow (see alt text)
The vicuña (Lama vicugna) or vicuna[3] (both /vɪˈkuːnjə/, very rarely spelled vicugna, its latin specific name)[4][5] is one of the two wild South American camelids, which live in the high alpine areas of the Andes; the other camelid is the guanaco, which lives at lower elevations.
November 9, 2025 at 6:08 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Here’s what it’s supposed to be (alt text for the name)
Picture of an Impala
November 9, 2025 at 2:39 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Finally got some letters for the kids room and let's just say they went deep down into the animal alphabet mines for the V and the I.
Animal letters spelling out DAVID, D = Dalmation A = Alligator V kinda looks like a lama and I is an animal with striped horns.
November 9, 2025 at 2:22 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
If you are wondering about their identification strategy.
Seems like they are controling for data collection site and years of education (and maybe also BMI). Seems a bit bold to assume that these were all existing confounders between soft drink consumption and depression and...the microbiome.
To test whether the effect of soft drink consumption on MDD diagnosis and symptom severity, respectively, was mediated by the gut microbiome, we used a mediation analysis with soft drink consumption as the predictor, Eggethella and Hungatella, respectively, as the mediator, and MDD diagnosis and symptom severity, respectively, as the outcome using the bias-corrected, nonparametric, bootstrap-based mediation analysis implemented in the Python pingouin library. Significance of the indirect (mediation) effect was computed using the permutation test as outlined by MacKinnon30 based on 10 000 permutations. Unless otherwise specified, all models included site and years of education as covariates to account for their potential confounding effects. We reran all the analyses including body mass index (BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) as an additional covariate. For all analyses including microbiome data, library size (the total count of sequencing reads per sample in 16S rRNA gene sequencing) was added as a covariate. Age and sex did not differ between groups and were not included as covariates. Observations in which the dependent and/or independent variables exceeded 4 standard deviations from the mean were excluded to prevent undue influence from extreme values. Note that all hypothesis tests were 2-sided, with an α level set at .05. We performed sensitivity analyses for the mediation model, which are detailed in Supplement 1 (eMethods 4 in Supplement 1).
November 9, 2025 at 7:22 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
I love that. No. 2 makes it so oddly specific I can't help but think one should go for No. 1 instead
First google search hit for the miami university oxford ohio: Miami University: No. 2 Public for Undergrad Teaching
November 9, 2025 at 7:14 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
TIL
The band's name is pronounced /fɪʃə ˈzɛd/ ("fisher zed"), a pun on "fish's head" with the "h" dropped, as is usual in many British regional accents. The pun also relies on leaving the "r" unpronounced as in common British non-rhotic accents.
November 7, 2025 at 2:23 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
tbf that was when we were actually recording a podcast
Screenshot of the causal bandits podcast episode with me in a very podcast-y looking setup
November 7, 2025 at 9:48 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
The fruits of their labor
Empty dessert cups stuck together with washi tape in front of a pillow castle yard
November 5, 2025 at 5:54 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Alternative suggestion
Cover of the first magic eye book A new way of looking at the world 3D illusions by magic eye inc
November 5, 2025 at 3:37 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
In contrast, his brother in Leipzig never lived up to his parents’ expectations.
Photo of the “Asia Bistro” Mr. wok
November 4, 2025 at 8:37 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Having some questions about the academic credentials of this bear who breaks into the home of a family on Christmas Eve, eats their Christmas dinner and steals their Christmas tree.
Picture of the cover of a German children’s book titled “Dr Brumms totally crazy Christmas”
November 4, 2025 at 7:17 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Ada has crafted a stop sign for her little brother that prohibits her from entering his bed 😭
November 1, 2025 at 3:53 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
I think in this counterfactual universe people are only aware of the coins in other people’s pockets, which feels like some kind of metaphor.
Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would, in the end, be selected and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails: (e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket.
October 31, 2025 at 2:10 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Hope people have ideas for how to navigate that situation. ngl, the term "theory" in psych always triggers me because ppl apply it to literally anything and then always claim that work needs to be more "theoretically motivated", by which they mean "cite these loose associations I put my name on"
Theory of Empty Theorizing (TROETE), Rohrer 2017
October 30, 2025 at 10:44 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Safely landed in very good company
Office setup: a variety of stats/methods books, a pair of socks with the face of Judea Pearl all over them, a Galton board.
October 30, 2025 at 10:01 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
My husband built the Wintergartenhochhaus, Leipzig’s iconic high-rise that used to be the highest residential building in East Germany.
Lego model of Wintergartenhochhaus. Wikipedia: The Wintergartenhochhaus is a 32-story high-rise building in Leipzig-Mitte, subdivision Ostvorstadt. The residential building was built from 1970 to 1972 as Wohnhochhaus Wintergartenstraße (residential high-rise on Wintergartenstrasse) and is the third tallest high-rise in Leipzig after the City-Hochhaus and the Hotel The Westin. With a total height of 106.8 m (350 ft) and 95.5 m (313 ft) roof height, it was the tallest residential building in the East Germany and is now in the top hundred on the list of high-rise buildings in Germany. As a building of modernity and testimony of East German architectural history with rarity value, it is under cultural heritage protection.
October 30, 2025 at 4:48 AM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Looks like Christmas came early this year 🤩 @vincentab.bsky.social
Photo of Vincent Arel-Bundock’s “Model to meaning”
October 29, 2025 at 5:22 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Omg you’re right
October 28, 2025 at 5:45 PM
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
How about instead:
Inspirational poster that says Run every study as if it were the last one on the topic
October 28, 2025 at 11:33 AM
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
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
jfc
A study of refugees from Guatemala found that lacking sufficient food almost eliminated the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder.3 The authors suggested that sharing of food and collective cooking might have created a sense of wellbeing. Again, collider bias might be an alternative explanation. Here, refugee status is the collider, which can arise from famine or food scarcity (the exposure) and war (which is a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder, the outcome). Among refugees, those displaced by famine may be less likely to have experienced war, producing a misleading negative association between food scarcity and post-traumatic stress disorder.
October 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM