Vithor Rosa Franco
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vthorrf.bsky.social
Vithor Rosa Franco
@vthorrf.bsky.social
660 followers 380 following 49 posts
Mathematical psychology, psychometrics, and computational methods from São Francisco University 🇧🇷 #science #bayes #r
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
maartenvsmeden.bsky.social
Kind reminder: data driven variable selection (e.g. forward/stepwise/univariable screening) makes things *worse* for most analytical goals
October 8, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
mcxfrank.bsky.social
Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.
Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.
July 1, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
tslumley.bsky.social
AIC comparing discrete to continuous (or mixed discrete/continuous to continous) models? Run away!
notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/07/22/a...
AIC and combined discrete/continuous models - Biased and Inefficient
notstatschat.rbind.io
July 22, 2025 at 6:34 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
NEW paper! 💭🖥️

“Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?”

— Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Table 1 Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.
May 14, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
pwgtennant.bsky.social
The case for #SlowScience has never been stronger.

We must prioritise thoughtful, creative, and collaborative research that cannot be mimicked by these plagiarism machines.
May 14, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
mzloteanu.bsky.social
#statstab #335 Bayesian New Statistics

Thoughts: An influential paper with a great overview of different approaches to research.

#bayesian #nhst #nhbt #estimation #testing #frequentist
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
May 2, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
malte.the100.ci
Genuine question to psychologists and other social scientists here: Have you been taught/Are you teaching that when designing a study/survey you should not ask about demographic stuff first? If so, what was the explanation given to you/you give?
March 25, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
richarddmorey.bsky.social
If one wanted to hire a professional #rstats #rshiny developer to work work with qualitative/text data in particular (so many involve a dashboard for search/semantic/sentiment analyses), do you have any recommendations of individuals or companies? (please repost)
March 13, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
caulfieldtim.bsky.social
Study: Psychological booster shots targeting memory increase long-term resistance against misinformation

"...text-based & video-based inoculation interventions can remain effective for one month..."

www.nature.com/articles/s41... by @profsanderlinden.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social et al.
March 12, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
dirkwulff.bsky.social
How can we reduce conceptual clutter in the psychological sciences?

@ruimata.bsky.social and I propose a solution based on a fine-tuned 🤖 LLM (bit.ly/mpnet-pers) and test it for 🎭 personality psychology.

The paper is finally out in @natrevpsych.bsky.social: go.nature.com/4bEaaja
March 11, 2025 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
eikofried.bsky.social
Are you doing EMA research and wonder how to go about it? In recent work we've adressed some open questions and challenges, here is a brief summary of papers and materials.

🧵 #PsychSciSky 🧪 #StatsSky
March 12, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
natrevpsychol.nature.com
Individual, intergroup and nation-level influences on belief in conspiracy theories

Review by Matthew J. Hornsey, Kinga Bierwiaczonek, Kai Sassenberg & Karen M. Douglas

Web: go.nature.com/3VoNjiv
PDF: rdcu.be/d9Lay
Individual, intergroup and nation-level influences on belief in conspiracy theories - Nature Reviews Psychology
Conspiracy theories have the potential to undermine governments, promote racism, ignite extremism and threaten public health efforts. In this Review, Hornsey et al. synthesize the literature on factor...
go.nature.com
February 13, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
fuschia-sirois.bsky.social
My efforts to raise awareness about the TEMPO toolkit has turned into a new creative obsession. Who would have thought creating info-animations would be so much fun!
Here's one on why compassion, NOT criticism, is the answer for those who struggle with #procrastination. Share!
youtu.be/Q8sEN4p5St8
Do you struggle with procrastination
YouTube video by Fuschia Sirois
youtu.be
January 31, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
heykatray.bsky.social
All the #NatureReviews journals and Nature Protocols are now on Bluesky, lots of Editors added to the starter pack too if you want to follow us 🧪

go.bsky.app/KcxvQLp
January 27, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
vsavalei.bsky.social
New paper with @mijke.bsky.social clarifying the distinction between factor scores and factor score estimates, open access! doi.org/10.1080/0027...
Estimated Factor Scores Are Not True Factor Scores
In this tutorial, we clarify the distinction between estimated factor scores, which are weighted composites of observed variables, and true factor scores, which are unobservable values of the under...
doi.org
January 24, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
matti.vuorre.com
Are you not a fan of journals' "enhanced online PDF viewers"? Me neither. I put together a little Firefox add-on that helps you skip the "enhanced" reader and download the PDF directly.
January 23, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
lewan.bsky.social
Superb effort -- a must read. (Pre-emptive heads-up for Republicans: no, teaching people something is not censorship, and it's not "woke" either.)
stefanherzog.bsky.social Stefan Herzog @stefanherzog.bsky.social · Jan 23
🌟🧠💪📝
#BOOSTING: Empowering citizens with behavioral science

New, freely available paper in Annual Review of Psychology.
PDF: tinyurl.com/boosting2025

For more: scienceofboosting.org

@arc-mpib.bsky.social @mpib-berlin.bsky.social

@annualreviews.bsky.social
#policy #behavioralscience

1/ 🧵👇
The image is the cover page of an article from the "Annual Review of Psychology" titled "Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science" by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig. It features a brief abstract, keywords, and publication details. The abstract outlines the concept of "boosting" as a behavioral public policy that emphasizes empowering individuals to make informed decisions, in contrast to "nudging," which subtly steers behavior. The abstract reads: Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people's agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches. List with summary points: 1. Behavioral public policy garnered widespread attention with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. 2. Criticisms of nudging include that it does not promote agency and competences and that it relies—overly optimistically—on the presence of benevolent choice architects. 3. The proliferation of environments threatening people's autonomy, the slow pace of systemic approaches to tackling societal issues, and the intrinsic benefits of empowerment make empowering citizens an indispensable objective of behavioral public policy. 4. Boosting is a behavioral public policy approach to empowerment grounded in evidence from behavioral science that shows that humans’ boundedly rational decision making is not as flawed as the nudging approach assumes. 5. Boosts are interventions that improve people's competencies to make informed choices that conform to their goals, preferences, and desires. 6. In self-nudging boosts, people learn to use architectural changes in their proximate choice environment to regulate their own behavior—that is, they are empowered to adapt their own choice environments. 7. There are boosts to foster core competences in many domains, including finance, online environments, and health, as well as broader, overarching areas, such as motivation, risk, and judgment and decision making. Boosts should be part of a policy mix that also includes system-level approaches. 8. When implementing boosts, policy makers need to avoid the trap of individualizing responsibility and to be mindful that, due to differences in cognition and motivation, inequalities in the desirable effects across boosted individuals may emerge.
January 23, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
🎬🎥🍿 Video of my keynote at MathPsych2024 now available online www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwN...

#CogSci #CriticalAI #AIhype #AGI #PsychSci #PhilSci 🧪
Iris van Rooij keynote at MathPsych/ICCM 2024
YouTube video by Society for Mathematical Psychology
www.youtube.com
January 11, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
revelle.bsky.social
Yet one more reason to avoid the use of tibbles and the "tidyverse".

See the thoughtful (if opinionated) post by Norm Matloff
github.com/matloff/Tidy....

I am admitted an old fogey but I find row names a very powerful tool for data manipulation.

See, for instance vJoin in psychTools.
GitHub - matloff/TidyverseSkeptic: An opinionated view of the Tidyverse "dialect" of the R language.
An opinionated view of the Tidyverse "dialect" of the R language. - matloff/TidyverseSkeptic
github.com
January 17, 2025 at 3:02 AM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
pettertornberg.com
Misinformation isn't random - it's strategic. 🧵

In the first cross-national comparative study, we examine 32M tweets from politicians.

We find that misinformation is not a general condition: it is driven by populist radical right parties.

with @julianachueri.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1177/1940...
January 14, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
markrubin.bsky.social
Popper vs Lakatos

New article by Dmytro Sepetyi attempts to reconcile Popper and Lakatos regarding the demarcation debate.

doi.org/10.1080/0269...

#PhilSci #PhilSky #AcademicSky 🧪
This article offers critical analysis of the debate between Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos about distinctive features of empirical science that allow to demarcate it from non-science and especially pseudoscience. Popper's demarcational proposition is explained as involving essentially two requirements, logical (to the theory itself, that it had potential falsifiers) and methodological (to scientists' attitude with respect to the theory, that they were willing to recognise its empirical falsification. Lakatos's criticisms of ‘Popper's basic rule’ that ‘criteria of refutation have to be laid down beforehand’ and Popper's reply to these criticisms, as well as Lakatos's alternative demarcational proposition, are discussed. The argument is made that although Lakatos's criticisms and proposition have considerable merits, he goes too far in claiming that it is OK for scientists to wave away or ignore apparent falsifications of a theory so long as the theory is successful in generating lots of successful unexpectable predictions, and generally understates the importance of the critical attitude for the development of science. On the other hand, Popper's falsificationist approach can be modified so as to accommodate sound points of Lakatos's criticisms and proposition while retaining the basic structure and critical rationalist character of Popper's demarcational proposition.
January 11, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
dsquintana.bsky.social
I think this plays a role for sure. I vaguely remember a study where the same paper was sent out authored by an economics Nobel laureate OR early career researcher, in which the the laureate’s paper had far more people offering to review it. It’s an extreme example but same mechanics at play
choroidlab.bsky.social Rob Mullins (he/him) @choroidlab.bsky.social · Jan 8
A little off topic, but my sense is that the names/nationalities of the authors can affect the editors' ability to get reviewers at all. It's hard to say (for me) what all goes into motivating a reviewer to say "yes" to an invite, but the author names probably can affect that.
January 8, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
natehaines.bsky.social
8/8 This was a lot of fun to write! And a long time coming.. As always, R code is all included in the post, and comments/feedback is welcomed 😁

Oh and of course, here is a link to the post: haines-lab.com/post/bayesia...
Bayesian Design Optimization: An Application to Item Reduction in Scale Development Research | Computational Psychology
Goals Survey-based measures are used throughout the social, behavioral, and health sciences–but how are they developed? And how do we know they measure the constructs they are meant to measure?
haines-lab.com
January 1, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
manymindspod.bsky.social
4. 'How should we think about IQ?' w/ @ent3c.bsky.social

disi.org/how-should-w...
How should we think about IQ? - Many Minds podcast
Exploring our world's diverse forms of mind—human, animal, machine—from diverse perspectives.
disi.org
December 30, 2024 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Vithor Rosa Franco
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Tip for women in science:

Don't collaborate with men who are not allies in the fight against sexism (unless you have no choice, which happens often of course).

You may think it is worth it, but really, it never is. You will end up mistreated and your ideas likely erased.
April 12, 2024 at 8:18 PM