post-doc in @GordPennycook/@DG_Rand's labs @Cornell/@MIT; phd with @minzlicht @UofT; data scientist @worldbank; study how we make decisions; musician/pianist
🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨
AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp
🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK
🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks)
🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy
🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate
New WP!
The illusory truth effect (repetition -> belief) is core to psych of beliefs, & thought to be a deep bias impacting misinfo, persuasion & advertising
Why would cognition include such a flaw? We argue it is a rational adaptation to high-quality info environments 🧵1/
Does effort make life more meaningful? Was Sisyphus living the dream? In our new paper (now accepted in Cognition!), across 6 studies with nearly 3,000 participants, we found that more effortful tasks feel more meaningful 🧵
New paper! Now in press at Cognition: "Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning"
Check out @AidanVCampbell's new paper. This was a real effort...and boy was it meaningful (especially now that it was accepted!). Check out the preprint here: https://t.co/KAkT1W3MDV
"On the role of analytic thinking in religious belief change: Evidence from over 50,000 participants in 16 countries"
✍️Michael N Stagnaro & @GordPennycook
Key finding: Reflection is associated with belief change independent of the direction of change.
https://t.co/GhAs9qEiJz
.@GordPennycook et al. found that while psychological inoculation helps detecting misinformation at scale globally, it may not be effective unless it is combined with accuracy reminders. @STWorg @DG_Rand@AdamBerinsky@hauselin
https://t.co/tJgo7AiD9M
📚🚨 I posted 11 new chapters of my upcoming book!
Model to Meaning: How to Interpret Statistical Results with #marginaleffects for #RStats and Python.
These are early drafts and I really need your feedback! Errors, content requests, improvements, etc.
https://t.co/vttQAbVcwN
🚨New in JEP:G @APA_Journals🚨
Why do ppl preferentially reciprocate follows by co-partisans online?
In a Twitter field exp & survey we find:
-Both content *and* social prefs drive co-party tie-making
-Distinct roles for in-party pref & out-party dispref
https://t.co/DBvoUps1m6
I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab at Brown! Please apply if you're interested in judgment and decision-making, social+cognitive psych, or using games/experiments/computational models to understand human behavior. Apps due Dec 1! More info: https://t.co/ASZvt1reN5
🚨Out in Nature!🚨
Many (eg Trump JimJordan @elonmusk) have accused social media of anti-conservative bias
Is this accurate?
We test empirically - and it's more complicated than you might think: conservatives ARE suspended more, but also share more misinfo https://t.co/xVcTUDdCEx
1/ New paper @Nature!
Discrepancy between human expectations of task difficulty and LLM errors harms reliability. In 2022, Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut predicted: "perhaps over time that discrepancy will diminish" (https://t.co/HADDUztzhu, min 61-64).
We show this is *not* the case!
Many of us measure altruism and selfishness in dollars and cents. If you want to know how selfless someone is—the logic goes—add up how much money they give to strangers or charity.
New work w/ @mollycrockett complicates this picture:
https://t.co/56D3nvBH2Z
🧵
I was on @NBCNightlyNews tonight talking about our work (@DG_Rand@GordPennycook) on countering conspiracies with AI.
Thanks for such a thoughtful interview, @HallieJackson.
Check it out!
Here’s the paper: https://t.co/TTtBjUk4im
announcing vegapunk:
our plug + go interface for online research involving interactions between AI models and human subjects. It’s like having a hyper-knowledgeable (research) confederate for your experiments and surveys.
https://t.co/iMx9ibkBL2
Today, I’m excited to share with you all the fruit of our effort at @OpenAI to create AI models capable of truly general reasoning: OpenAI's new o1 model series! (aka 🍓) Let me explain 🧵 1/
🚨Out in Science!🚨
Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, ya?
WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20%!
-Lasts over 2mo
-Works on entrenched beliefs
-Tailored AI response rebuts specific evidence offered by believers
https://t.co/3Rg79Cx5id
1/