Excellent point. Vaccine-related flagged misinformation was 0.3% on Facebook (usual) BUT non-flagged vaccine-skeptical content was much more diffused and had a 46X estimated effect. Study news not fake news! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Meta-analysis: Levels of discrimination against different groups in studies where researchers send fake CVs to employers and count the responses. <0% = discrimination against the group in question. Blue = statistically significant. stevestewartwilliams.com/p/who-gets-the…

“While some evolutionary psychology research focuses on adverse elements of the human experience, it would be…foolish to think that evolutionary psychologists…are advocating for such phenomena simply by studying and documenting them.” psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwin… Psychology Today

The right direction

1/ THREAD 🧵Elite panic over A.I. disinformation and deepfakes in the EU elections was rampant. But did democracy drown in tidal wave of disinformation? 🔎Let’s take a look.

Publishing tomorrow: conspicuouscognition.com

Preprint of Alberto Acerbi and my chapter for the EHBEA textbook “Evolution, Culture and Human Behavior”. We harness the explanatory power of an evolutionary perspective to examine digital media’s effects on wellbeing, cooperation, misinfo, and politics. osf.io/preprints/psya…

I wrote this thing about JD Vance , ordo amoris, and what we owe each other. medium.com/@nicholaraihan…

Economic game studies show conservatives are less prosocial, but it is specifically economic conservatism that is linked to selfishness/competitiveness whereas social conservatism is not, & is instead linked to 'groupishness'/intergroup-biased prosociality osf.io/preprints/psya…

"our study suggests the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive" blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digi…

What if the truth about AI is more boring than we'd like? by Dan Williams open.substack.com/pub/conspicuou…

Self-control is crucial for success but is not really something you can get better at. Instead, it's a personality trait. So, if you don't have much of it, you probably never will, and will have to use many life hacks to control your behaviors, e.g., Ozempic.

Looking forward to be in Paris next week for the conference "Explaining culture: an interdisciplinary approach". I will present some new work with Kyle Fischer - first version of slides and abstract at the link! acerbialberto.com/talk/2025_pari…

It looks like genes are largely responsible for variation in social media use, variation in well-being, and the relationship between them. (Shared environment/parental influence seems to have little to no effect.) 🧵 #smma

Very happy to share the preprint of the study Alberto Acerbi and I have been working on, showing that, like fake news, factual news uses negative and divisive (including group-binding, anti-outgroup, and dominance-oriented) content to get attention. doi.org/10.31234/osf.i…

🚨New preprint with Kyle Fischer What drives engagement with *reliable* news on social media?