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Jan K. Woike

@jan-k-woike.bsky.social

660 followers 590 following 24 posts

University of Plymouth (UK); Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin; Decision Making Researcher

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Jan K. Woike @jan-k-woike.bsky.social · Jun 25

Sage Perspectives Interview:
www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...

DOI: 10.1177/09567976241267854
@shafenbraedl.bsky.social
@patkanngiesser.bsky.social

Research with impact: Q&A with Patricia Kanngiesser & Jan Woike

We're interviewing the Sage authors who've had their research shared widely last year and made an impact on the popular consciousness. Hear about their experience of going mainstream, and how you can ...

www.sagepub.com

Jan K. Woike

@jan-k-woike.bsky.social

"The corporate legal leaders from five sectors [...] overwhelmingly (83%) said that they believed that “doing the right thing” came secondary to profit in business decision-making within their organisation." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

More than half of UK businesses changing DEI approach due to Trump’s criticism

Leading UK organisations reacting to pushback against diversity initiatives in the US by reviewing or even scrapping policies

www.theguardian.com

October 31, 2025 at 12:46 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Chris Morran

@themorrancave.bsky.social

"According to his running club, the man, who is a U.S. citizen, was returning from a team run when agents pulled him out of his vehicle, tackled him to the ground and kneeled on top of him, allegedly breaking six ribs and causing internal bleeding"

US citizen, 67, ‘has six ribs broken’ by Border Patrol agents, his running club says

The incident unfolded Saturday in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood, where residents say federal agents disrupted a children’s Halloween parade

www.independent.co.uk

October 28, 2025 at 8:40 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Margot Finn

@eicathomefinn.bsky.social

We'll all have our favourite bits of the White Paper. Mine include the shocking revelation that 'some' universities 'link research performance to promotion opportunities and pay progression' (page 49, top paragraph). Of all the 'perverse incentives' to offer university research staff....

Research Professional News @resprofnews.bsky.social · 24d

Research funding and REF reforms ‘will drive specialisation’

Government says plans for university sector in its post-16 skills and education white paper could result in “more focused volume of research”

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

Research funding and REF reforms ‘will drive specialisation’ - Research Professional News

Government says white paper plans for universities could result in “more focused volume of research”

www.researchprofessionalnews.com

October 21, 2025 at 12:21 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Charlie Masquelier

@charlesmasquelier.bsky.social

I'm struggling to find anything inspiring about this vision of HE, where universities are turned into mere training centres. It totally fails to understand that they're essential for democracy and the White Paper risks undermining this crucial role. Post-16 white paper: share.google/iJelQxcEOt22...

share.google

October 21, 2025 at 5:55 AM

Jan K. Woike

@jan-k-woike.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Big Tech deploys Orwellian doublespeak to mask its democratic corrosion | Peter Lewis

As AI asserts its power to shape social evolution, regulation is decried as ‘state control’ rather than the expression of our collective will

www.theguardian.com

October 15, 2025 at 12:54 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Greg Sargent

@gregsargent.bsky.social

Trump is no longer even pretending to have any kind of argument that his murdering of people in the Caribbean Sea has any kind of statutory validity. Just straight up declaring that he has quasi-unlimited power to execute people based on (nominal) suspicion.

October 14, 2025 at 6:20 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

CNN

@cnn.com

President Donald Trump threatened to relocate World Cup matches set to be played next year in suburban Boston, after suggesting that parts of the city had been “taken over” by unrest. https://cnn.it/4901Nze

Trump threatens to yank World Cup games from Boston, though it's up to FIFA to choose sites | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to relocate World Cup matches set to be played next year in suburban Boston, after suggesting that parts of the city had been “taken over” by unrest.

cnn.it

October 15, 2025 at 11:00 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

David Ho

@davidho.bsky.social

“A clarinet player was arrested after playing her instrument to the tune of the ‘Ghostbusters’ theme song outside of a Portland ICE facility…”

Musician playing ‘Ghostbusters’ outside ICE facility is arrested by agents

‘Taking us citizens out of state to detain them without charge is a new action from the Feds and should be opposed,’ her band said

www.independent.co.uk

October 15, 2025 at 10:59 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Barb McQuade

@barbmcquade.bsky.social

This is an old formula used by authoritarian regimes. Stoke chaos and blame scapegoats to justify the use of force.

October 5, 2025 at 12:25 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Erik Angner

@erikangner.com

The Dawit Isaak Library in Malmö is releasing a special edition of Orwell’s 1984. The book cannot be read, on account of having two spines. The “double bind” is a protest against censorship across the world: malmo.se/boundbookspr...

October 5, 2025 at 3:01 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Iris van Rooij 💭

@irisvanrooij.bsky.social

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. lnkd.in/ewajedAe

🧪

Table 1

Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations.

See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

October 4, 2025 at 5:40 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Now, we tackle in turn the issues we outlined in the abstract:

First, the displacement of human participants, tracing the history of technologies to recruit real people, we end up forgetting the whole point: gathering — not fabricating! — human data. More at section 3: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

5/

3 Displacement of Participants
Many technological solutions to recruiting and managing participants have been proposed: from original pen and paper sign
up sheets and physical bulletin boards to computer systems like
SONA, which digitised and automated some of these processes,
and then furthermore to platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical
Turk (MTurk), which allows participants to be outsourced to
sweatshops (e.g. C. A. Anderson et al., 2019; Douglas et al., 2023;
Gamblin et al., 2017; Gray & Suri, 2019; Hauser & Schwarz, 2016;
Wagner et al., 2022). It may be the case that systems like MTurk,
which is named after the infamous pseudo-automaton which
beat Napoleon at chess (Manninger, 2024), indeed have clear
pros and cons, and are perhaps not inherently abusive. However,
they are clearly open to abuse (C. A. Anderson et al., 2019; Guest,
2024; Newman, 2019; Pettit, 2024c; Stephens, 2023). MTurk’s
namesake, the original Mechanical Turk, was a device that comprised a cupboard with a chess board on top and which across
the player sat an orientalist puppet. However much it may have
seemed the puppet played chess, it was instead a hidden human
who moved the pieces.

In the present, sweatshops based on Amazon’s MTurk technology undergird all modern AI products (Alba, 2023; Bansal,
2025; Equidem, 2025; Gershgorn, 2017; Gray & Suri, 2019; Manninger, 2024; Perrigo, 2023; Stephens, 2023; Streitfeld, 2025; Suri,
2019; Yang et al., 2020). This human-in-the-loop technique has
had applications in the 2010s with deep artificial neural networks
that performed what is claimed to be human-like vision, and
in the 2020s with reinforcement learning from human feedback
(e.g. Birhane et al., 2023; Guest & Martin, 2025b; Kirk et al., 2023;
Manninger, 2024; Prabhu & Birhane, 2020; Suri, 2019).
The next iteration of this is to completely obfuscate the
human-in-the-loop (Guest, 2025; Guest & Martin, 2025a;
Shiffrin & Mitchell, 2023) and present AI products, such as those
powered by large language models (LLMs), as able to stand in
for, displace, human participants or their data (cf. Crockett &
Messeri, 2023; Dillion et al., 2023; Jamieson et al., 2023; Rilla et
al., 2025; Rossi et al., 2024; Schröder et al., 2025). This is problematic for many reasons (viz. Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van Rooij
& Guest, 2025), but some lesser discussed angles are that the AI
products cannot replace human participants but are merely a)
returning unethically sourced (pre-existing) human data (Alba,
2023; Bansal, 2025; Equidem, 2025; Guest, 2025; Perrigo, 2023).
And as such, b) these data have statistically unfavourable properties according to what are stated norms of the field, such as comprising double dipping (Y. Liu et al., 2024; Villalobos et al., 2024;

What is most disparaging if we continue down this route, is
not only that it leads to data fabrication on steroids but that also
we will depend on a machine that, for lack of a less anthropomorphic term, lies, and lies about lying by design (Bender & Hanna,
2025; Bender et al., 2021; DeVrio et al., 2025; Edwards, 2023b;
Hicks et al., 2024; Metz, 2023; Xu et al., 2025; Zhao et al., 2025).
It deceives through the Eliza effect, the cognitive bias towards assigning human-like traits to chatbots (Borau, 2025; Dillon, 2020;
Koike & Loughnan, 2021; Weizenbaum, 1966), and the BarnumForer effect, the phenomenon where one thinks generic person

October 4, 2025 at 5:58 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Second, if we uncritically adopt AI in psychology, we outsource programming of our experiments to companies. This undoes a lot of open source: experiments are under industry capture, written without formal specifications. It deskills us: psychologists spent the last decade learning to code.

6/

4 Outsourcing Programming to Companies
[Sanford’s mechanical vernier chronoscope] had
two pendulums, one set longer than the other but
both set at known lengths. When the stimulus
appeared, the longer pendulum was released mechanically. When the participant pressed the key in
response, the shorter pendulum was similarly released. By counting the number of swings it took
the shorter pendulum to catch up with the longer,
experimenters could use a mathematical formula
to calculate the difference in time between the two
events. (Evans, 2000, p. 322–323)
A century later, all this is now done by programming computers to display stimuli, and collect and analyse data. The largely
harmless and perhaps even beneficial (cf. Guest, 2025) transition
to computational experimentation, where all instruments (e.g.
EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking) are hooked up to the codebase for running experiments and the database for storing participant data,
has been completed through: the adoption of programmes such
as SPSS for statistics (Landau & Everitt, 2003) and E-Prime for
presenting stimuli (Spapé et al., 2019); and training psychologists
to use programming languages (e.g. R, Python; British Psychological Society, 2017; Peirce et al., 2022). The last part, from the
mid 2010s onwards, where psychologists spent time and effort
learning how to program is a massively laudable case of reskilling
(N. D. Anderson, 2016; Guest & Forbes, 2024; Scherer et al.,
2019)

From the 2020s, however with the rise of the kinds of AI products we critique herein, this is under threat. If scientists accept
the AI “snakeoil” and “con” (Bender & Hanna, 2025; Bjarnason,
2023; Narayanan & Kapoor, 2024) and use it to deskill themselves
from learning proper programming, then code reproducibility
and verifiability are lost causes; not just short-lived, dead on arrival (Becker et al., 2025a). If the code is for running experiments,
strange side-effects will be present from so-called ‘vibe coding’
(Harkar, 2025), which is ‘programming’ using a chatbot such
that nothing is checked or verified against software engineering
principles and only the output being seen as acceptable under a
small sample of conditions is evaluated. This means that because
standards are ignored and best practises are violated the stimuli
may be presented in the wrong order, participant data may not
be properly or securely saved, and the code may be unmaintainable (Burgess, 2023, 2025; El-Mhamdi et al., 2022; Greshake et al.,
2023; Ming, 2025; Tangermann, 2025). And the same is true for
this non-engineered code in the case of analysing data, which will
not only not be analysed, but open to all sorts of bugs. To add insult to injury, because the scientist is not practising programming
or never learned how to code, all this will be outside their skill
level and they will be unable to detect and fix these issues (Becker

As Danielle Navarro (2015) says about shortcuts through using inappropriate technology, which chatbots are, we end up digging ourselves into “a very deep hole.” She goes on to explain:
The business model here is to suck you in during
your student days, and then leave you dependent on
their tools when you go out into the real world. [...]
And you can avoid it: if you make use of packages
like R that are open source and free, you never get
trapped having to pay exorbitant licensing fees. (pp.
37–38)
These were and are the reasons to switch from e.g. SPSS, which is
owned by IBM, to R or Python (Wills, 2019). The same and more
hold for being locked in and addicted to AI products, which have
closed or industry-controlled source code (Hao, 2025; Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2024; Liesenfeld et al., 2023; Maffulli, 2023;
Maris, 2025; Mirowski, 2023; Solaiman, 2023) , and mislead us
into overestimating our programming abilities (Lehmann et al.,
2025)

October 4, 2025 at 6:07 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Third, the peculiar idea that somehow we don't need to read, write, or perform literature reviews anymore; popping up like a satanic mushroom in almost all so-called OK uses of LLMs.

Companies writing our papers via their chatbots is not scientific at all. See section 5: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

7/

table 1 extract from Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

In addition, who is held accountable if nobody with intent
authored the text? Because while the original data fed into the
system is certainly written with goals, messages, and audiences in
mind jumbling this into ad-libbed word salad removes authorial
intent (Bender et al., 2021). So do the companies who own the
chatbot own the text or do the original authors? These questions
denote legal battles, which are being currently fought in the public eye and which affect all of us in all roles, not just as academics
(Creamer, 2025; Knibbs, 2024; Reuters, 2025). Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

October 4, 2025 at 6:16 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘

@kojamf.bsky.social

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

October 5, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar.com

Trump posts that Sen. Blumenthal “should be allowed to speak no longer”

Sanctimonious Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal, perhaps the biggest “joke” in the United States Senate, is at it again! “Dick” lied until the midpoint of his political career, convincing everyone, in particular the Fake News Media, that he was a great “War Hero” who lived on the precipice of death in the jungles of Vietnam. He would talk about his life in the military in almost every speech, in particular the death defying dangers he faced in his many years “fight for freedom” while in Vietnam. He stated that “the battles were violent and long, but there was no going back” - And then it happened, Blumenthal was found out to be a FRAUD. The soldiers in his so-called “platoon” came forward and said that they had no idea who this guy was. He was revealed, broke down and admitted, tears flowing from his eyes, that he LIED, a Whopper, one that lasted 20 year. This guy shouldn’t even be in the U.S. Senate. It should be investigated, and Justice should be sought. Right now there is a Congressman sitting in prison for lying about his past during a campaign. Well, those lies were nothing compared to those of Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal, perhaps the greatest phony in the history of the United States Senate. He should be allowed to speak no longer!

October 8, 2025 at 1:32 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Melanie D’Arrigo

@darrigomelanie.bsky.social

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

October 7, 2025 at 11:29 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

mark brandt

@mjbsp.bsky.social

Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology

arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06950

August 18, 2025 at 1:52 AM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Chris Murphy

@chrismurphyct.bsky.social

He's telling us what he's doing. Using the military to suppress protest. At some point the opposition needs to listen to him and adjust strategy.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Sep 30

Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats -- what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That's a war too. It's war from within"

September 30, 2025 at 2:31 PM

Jan K. Woike

@jan-k-woike.bsky.social

As a matter of fact, the US president posted a deep-fake video with himself in it, dove into conspiracy theories and promoted an alternative reality. Wonder how the response would have been in 2023. www.rawstory.com/medbed-trump/

'Truly insane': Trump posts bizarre QAnon claim he will heal people with alien 'medbeds'

President Donald Trump posted a video apparently created by artificial intelligence promising to heal people through a QAnon conspiracy with so-called medbeds involving alien technology.The video post...

www.rawstory.com

September 30, 2025 at 3:11 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Ms. Kevin

@kkalmes31.bsky.social

The more RFKJr does, the less Americans like him. CNN statistician Harry Enten revealed the health secretary scored an alarming -21 approval rating as he faces backlash over his massive cuts to medical research and moves to limit vaccine access. www.yahoo.com/news/videos/...

A disastrous month has given a new member of Trump’s cabinet the dubious title.

The more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does things, the less Americans like him. CNN statistician Harry Enten on Thursday morning revealed that the health secretary scored an alarming -21 approval rating in a...

www.yahoo.com

September 25, 2025 at 7:50 PM

Reposted by Jan K. Woike

Lauren Ashley Davis

@laurenmeidasa.bsky.social

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said he was conducting a "social experiment" by sporting a mustache in the style of Adolf Hitler, and claimed that it made him more attractive to women.

www.rawstory.com/alex-jones-2...