Mark Rubin
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markrubin.bsky.social
Mark Rubin
@markrubin.bsky.social
19K followers 1.9K following 5.1K posts
social psychology ▪︎ metascience ▪︎ philosophy of science ▪︎ higher education

Professor at Durham University, UK. He/him.

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/markrubinsocialpsychresearch/

Substack: https://markrubin.substack.com/
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markrubin.bsky.social
#PhilSci #PsycSci #SocialPsyc #CogPsyc #AcademicSky
markrubin.bsky.social Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · Jul 2
Excellent new preprint by Sarahanne Field and @maddipow.bsky.social argues “bias is not a contaminant to be purged; it is a constitutive element of research, shaping every decision from hypothesis formation to data interpretation.”

Few quotes follow...🧵
maddipow.bsky.social Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · Jul 2
"Science is not, and has never been, a neutral endeavour... the notion that researchers can or should cleanse themselves of bias is untenable, potentially intellectually dishonest, and ethically fraught."

New preprint with the (brilliant) Sarahanne Field #Metascience2025

osf.io/preprints/os...
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
maddipow.bsky.social Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · Mar 20
Had a lovely time presenting to @femquant.bsky.social about how reflexivity in quantitative researcher may improve transparency and rigour. We talked about how open science frames "bias" as a problem to be stamped out, but feminist epistemological approaches offer a different (more nuanced) take
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
markrubin.bsky.social Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · Dec 10
"My gut bubbles and tumbles as I see it: the Bias Monster. My confession did not come fast enough, was not thorough enough to vanquish the beast. And now it has come to destroy my research."

Excellent work by @sashelton.bsky.social

#Methodology 🧪
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
See also Hahn and Harris (2014):

“‘Bias’ is neither necessarily irrational nor bad in any wider sense.”

psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-...
In this chapter, we provide a historical overview of research on bias in human cognition, ranging from early work in psychology through the detailed, quantitative examinations of belief revision in the 1960s, the Heuristic and Biases program initiated by Kahneman and Tversky, and bias focused research in personality and social psychology. Different notions of "bias" are identified and compared with the notion of bias in statistics, machine learning, and signal detection theory. Comparison with normative models then forms the basis for a critical look at the evidence that people succumb to motivated reasoning aimed at enabling them "to believe what they want to believe."
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
As with bias, there are two interpretations of variability (noise):

(1) Noise is functional: Variability is necessary for progress, innovation, and evolution.

(2) Noise is error: Variability
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
“As a consequence, the functional question (“What does a bias achieve?”) is virtually never asked, nor is the question of whether biases can enable better judgments.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
“Decision researchers who identify with the view of bias as error take the deviation between judgment and true state as the explanandum (i.e., what needs to be explained), not the judgment itself.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
“The error view, in contrast, aligns with direct realism, the idea that we can directly experience the outside world, such as in James J. Gibson’s theory of direct perception.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
“The functional interpretation of bias aligns with a pragmatic view of the world, best known from the philosophical pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
“The error view measures bias against a true state, such as a correct answer to a problem. The functional view, in contrast, does not require knowledge of a true state.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
Two definitions of bias:

(1) Bias is functional: Biases are necessary for cognition.

(2) Bias is error: Biases hamper cognition and should be eliminated
I distinguish two meanings of the term bias in the social sciences. In the first, biases are functional: they are necessary, and simultaneously enable and constrain perception and cognition. In the second, biases are viewed as errors and ideally should be reduced to zero. In the functional view, bias is value-neutral, neither good nor bad. This pragmatic perspective accepts that cognition must operate under conditions of uncertainty (rather than the certainty of a “small world”) and intractability (where the optimal solution cannot be calculated). Biases enable cognition to deal with these situations where probability theory offers no guidance, for instance, through intelligent heuristics. In contrast, the error view assigns a negative value to bias. It assumes that cognition deals with problems where the true state of the world is known with certainty – at least to some authority. This distinction has profound implications for research design: the two views lead not only to different answers, but also to different questions. Researchers who adopt the error view take the deviation between judgment and true state as the explanandum, not the judgment itself. As a consequence, the functional question – What does a bias achieve? – is virtually never asked, nor is the possibility considered that certain biases might lead to better judgments. This is one reason why less-is-more effects –conditions under which ignoring information yield more accurate inferences – were discovered only recently. Ultimately, views about the nature of bias can themselves become a bias in research on biases.
November 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM
markrubin.bsky.social
And there’s a ton more psychology starter packs here…

#SocialPsyc #PsycSci #Psychology
November 8, 2025 at 10:16 AM
markrubin.bsky.social
November 8, 2025 at 10:16 AM
markrubin.bsky.social
Hi Mark! There’s a couple of social psychology starter packs here you might be interested in...
November 8, 2025 at 10:16 AM
markrubin.bsky.social
New work by Joelle-Cathrin Flöther and @julianedegner.bsky.social suggests we should integrate both positive and negative evaluations into measures of social identification.

#SocialPsyc #AcademicSky
Testing the multicomponent ingroup identification model in diverse stigmatized groups: model fit, group differences, and predictors of social identification
Social identities play a crucial role in shaping how individuals interpret their position in society and navigate social interactions to serve both personal and ingroup interests. Existing social i...
doi.org
November 7, 2025 at 5:50 PM