Neil Lewis, Jr.
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neillewisjr.bsky.social
Neil Lewis, Jr.
@neillewisjr.bsky.social
29K followers 1.2K following 3K posts
Behavioral Scientist & Science Communicator.

Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Associate Professor of Communication, Medicine, and Public Policy at Cornell University.

More here: neillewisjr.com
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neillewisjr.bsky.social
Beautiful end to the day.
Sunset over Cornell University's west campus.
November 4, 2025 at 10:43 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Fall foliage in the top third, blue skies and lake in the middle. Shoreline and grass in the bottom.
October 26, 2025 at 9:49 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
View of a body of water through an opening in overhanging tree branches with green leaves, some of which are starting to turn yellow and brown.
October 2, 2025 at 9:57 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
"Nevertheless, the aggressiveness of Trump’s executive aggrandizement is worrisome. Despite the relative strength of U.S. democratic constraints, Trump has pursued his agenda with a speed that outpaces even some of the most rapid cases of democratic erosion, like Hungary and Poland. And compared to the backsliding approaches taken in countries ranging from Ecuador to India, the Trump team’s approach has been more immediate and expansive than is common. It may seem comforting that despite this rapidity, U.S. democratic backsliding is still less institutionalized or overtly repressive than many other backsliding cases. But in light of the high barriers to democratic erosion in the United States, what makes the current context especially troubling is not the relative extremity of Trump’s executive aggrandizement, but how fast and systematically he has achieved these aims within a democratic system once thought to be impervious."
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
This.

(The entire article is required reading, but I especially appreciate this section)
"Very few of us are moral saints—certainly not me. Unlike everlasting, lofty, abstract principles, we who try feebly to live up to them down in the muck of reality face mucky obstacles: we get tired, impatient, envious, and angry. Our values and principles ask more than most of us are able to give—if they don’t, they are probably too weak to be worth holding. But we don’t have to celebrate our failures or, worse still, confuse them with our successes. This is one valuable function of shame: it reminds us of who we want to be when we fall short, a goalpost that is necessarily anchored to the lofty height that our conduct fell beneath. We also encourage and defend these general social standards when we hold others to them, and not just ourselves."
September 23, 2025 at 10:17 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
"We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations..."

The focus of the conversations:
Disney stock value over the past month. Latest decline started on the day they canceled Jimmh Kimmel's show.
September 22, 2025 at 9:58 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Unilever, parent company of Ben & Jerry's, has apparently been pressuring B&J to stay quiet rather than speak up on contemporary issues. Unilever does not want to upset the powers that be.

Jerry refuses to be silenced. He resigned so he can speak up.

Letter ⤵️
freebenandjerrys.com/wp-content/u...
Jerry's resignation letter. Link in main post.
September 18, 2025 at 3:26 AM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
A body of water and blue skies framed by trees, some of which have leaves that are turning yellow and brown (fall colors).
September 14, 2025 at 6:18 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
"I think about this now, as the concerted attack on education mounted by the Trump administration is being met more with institutional silence or compliance than with resistance. From one perspective, this is not so surprising; there was little institutional resistance from university leaders during the McCarthy period, as Ellen Schrecker’s history, No Ivory Tower, so clearly shows. Still, watching the craven response of so many to the imposition of authoritarian rule has been upsetting. With the mission of democratic education itself at stake, I expected resistance, even from those who were administering the neoliberal university as a corporate autocracy, treating education as an enhancement of human capital and knowledge production as a private commodity rather than a public good."
September 14, 2025 at 1:31 AM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
I see this paper is relevant again.

"death polarizes morality judgments: Moral leaders were posthumously judged as more moral while immoral leaders were posthumously judged as more immoral."

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Academic article: The demise of leadership: Positivity and negativity biases in evaluations of dead leaders
September 11, 2025 at 12:40 AM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Sunset over water in the background. Tree turning fall colors in the foreground.
September 2, 2025 at 11:11 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Another application of round-number bias

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Research article: "The prospect of a perfect ending: Loss aversion and the round-number bias."
August 11, 2025 at 10:00 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
It's really interesting to see them go after these metrics, given the empirical reality of how (elite) universities use them.

archive.is/oZEM1
Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification.
August 5, 2025 at 9:10 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Now you have to start scheduling your haircuts for a certain week every year.

abcnews.go.com/US/economist...
He jokingly described a tell that often gives away aspiring Nobel Prize recipients in his field to their colleagues each fall around this time of year. “They’ve got a new haircut because they're kind of hoping [to win],” Romer said. “So you'll see if you look at the pictures I haven't had a haircut yet.” “I never thought I would win the prize," he said.
August 1, 2025 at 1:09 AM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
I wonder if the Columbia leadership realizes (or cares) how much blowback there might be from *within* the academy.

This post, from a Cornell Law professor, is worth reading:

3d.laboratorium.net/2025-07-25-c...
I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.
July 26, 2025 at 6:34 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Something I'm thinking/wondering about as I see some of the decisions universities are making lately: how much of this is driven by the strategies brought to them by their trustees who are also corporate board members.

www.jstor.org/stable/3838786
Playing the Board Game: An Empirical Analysis of University Trustee and Corporate Board Interlocks
July 18, 2025 at 3:09 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
I've been thinking about this Milgram quote a lot lately. It's from an interview he did with 60 Minutes.
"I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."
July 9, 2025 at 5:48 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
These bullet points 😠

(www.afge.org/local/l3403/...)
This afternoon, AFGE Local 3403 received notice that HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin will announce HUD’s takeover of the National Science Foundation headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia tomorrow. Currently more than 1,833 NSF employees work in the building. Many were forced to relocate to Northern Virginia with very short notice and at great personal expense when return to work orders were given. AFGE Local 3403 has not been briefed on the exact details of the plan. The Union was told plans include the following: • A dedicated executive suite for the HUD Secretary on the 19th floor. • The construction of an executive dining room. • Reserved parking spaces for the Secretary’s 5 cars. • Exclusive use of one elevator for the Secretary. • A space dedicated to hosting the Secretary’s executive assistants on the 18th floor. • A potential gym for the HUD Secretary and his family. While Secretary Turner and his staff are busy enjoying private dining and a custom gym, NSF employees are being displaced with no plan, no communication, and no respect.
June 25, 2025 at 12:55 AM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
PSA for those living in most of Canada and in the States east of the Rocky Mountains: plan to minimize your time outside for (at least) the next few days--the air quality forecasts are not looking great due to the wildfires.

firesmoke.ca/forecasts/cu...
Map of air quality in Canada and the United States.
June 8, 2025 at 8:23 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
2/3. The most striking takeaway for me: "the news attention [counter-messaging] has received in early 2025 is of a magnitude similar to the level of attention to structural racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and disparities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020."
Graphs displaying news stories over time. First panel shows "structural racism" mentions over time--which was concentrated in 2020 and early 2021. Second panel shows "critical race theory" mentions in mid 2021-2023 Third panel shows "DEI" mentions since 2023--early 2025.
June 5, 2025 at 4:24 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Good morning
June 2, 2025 at 1:54 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Wrote this a year ago. Still find all of this interesting.

www.brookings.edu/articles/uni...
It has been interesting to watch university leaders attempt to persuade legislative attackers, especially as someone who has spent much of my professional life studying, and teaching about, persuasion and social influence processes. Academic administrators seem to assume that if they attempt to placate legislators, those legislators will leave them alone. Instead of leaving them alone, however, their persuasion attempts have resulted in legislators calling for their resignation.
May 31, 2025 at 2:57 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
I would hope that, by this point, university leaders who are still "negotiating" with the administration have their eyes wide open about the fact that these negotiations are all in bad faith.
The White House is looking to strike a deal with a high-profile school, said the first source, who is involved in the higher education response. “They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,” this person said. “They want Trump to be able to stand up and say he made a deal with so-and-so – an Ivy League school, some sort of name-brand school that gives them cover so they can say, ‘We don’t want to destroy higher education.’”
May 31, 2025 at 2:57 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Some history:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
In Cohen’s writings (e.g., Cohen, 1988), and in most current psychology research, the recommended level of power is conventionally 80%, yielding a false-negative error rate (β) of 20% if the alternative hypothesis is true and test assumptions are met. This arbitrary convention stems from Cohen’s (1965) intuition, made by his own admission “diffidently” (p. 99), that false positives are four times worse for science than false negatives. Hence, if “false positives” (α) are kept at 5%,1 “false negatives” (β) should be no more than 20%. The value of the 80% blanket recommendation is explored more in Controversy #4.
May 27, 2025 at 11:10 PM
neillewisjr.bsky.social
Timeline Cleanse
May 27, 2025 at 8:27 PM