Nina Wang

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)!

How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science.

Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?"
We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity)
📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps
📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok
📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interested in doing a postdoc on misinfo/belief change with me and @gordpennycook.bsky.social? We are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at York University. Contact me for more details! #PsychJobs

Call for Proposals: Data Collection for Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath January 27, 2026 We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se- lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com). Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’ choosing. The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi- pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺

1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment
2️⃣ run a novel experiment

on repdata.com

3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies
4️⃣ publish your study

details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_...
applications open Feb 1

please repost!

And we're live, Lecture A1 is online. Introduction to Bayesian workflow, generative models, estimands, estimators, estimates, error checking, beginnings of probability theory and Bayesian updating. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...

🚀 Announcing the Besample Dissertation Grant (N=3,000)

If you’re a Ph.D. student in psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication, or any related field, this is your chance to get full funding for testing your theory across cultures.

Apply: study.besample.app/jfe/form/SV_...

Now in PNAS! With @mmosleh.bsky.social and @dgrand.bsky.social

Examining news engagement across 7 platforms, we find:
- differences WRT political lean ("echo platforms")
- similarities WRT news quality (posting low qual news => more engagement)

Read paper and thread for more!

📢POSTDOC POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT📢

@nourkteily.bsky.social & I are recruiting a postdoc in the #LitowitzCenter for Enlightened Disagreement. We seek research excellence regarding navigating conflict.

Application deadline: Nov. 17.

Salary: ~$80k.

facultyrecruiting.northwestern.edu/apply/MjQzNw==

Budding Minds We are a developmental cognitive neuroscience lab located on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. Our research aims to understand how we form and recall memories, and how we can use...

The Budding Minds Lab at the University of Toronto is hiring a Postdoc in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory 🧠 🫧 This is (one of) my graduate labs and I can't recommend the department's people, resources, location, or culture strongly enough! see buddingmindslab.utoronto.ca for more

Humans and LLMs rate deliberation as superior to intuition on complex reasoning tasks - Communications Psychology People and LLMs evaluate deliberative reasoning more favorably than intuitive thinking—even when both yield accurate results. This preference appears to be intuitive itself and has implications for how we assess others’ and AI advise.

People and LLMs evaluate deliberative reasoning more favorably than intuitive thinking—even when both yield accurate results. This preference appears to be intuitive itself and has implications for how we assess others’ and AI advise.
@wimdeneys.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📢The 2026 edition of the SPSP Misinformation & Belief Science preconference will be held virtually on Tuesday, February 24.🎉 Submit an abstract for either a single presenter or data blitz presentation by October 23 (link below) and don’t forget to register to attend by February 13!

Influence of early life adversity and breed on aggression and fear in dogs - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Influence of early life adversity and breed on aggression and fear in dogs

📣 New publication alert! In a large, diverse sample, #CompanionDogs with a history of trauma before 6 months were seen as more fearful and/or aggressive than trauma-free dogs or those with trauma later on in life
🧪 #CanineScience #DogBehaviour #EarlyLifeAdversity doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I'm in!

I am recruiting (Canadian🇨🇦) graduate students at York University for Fall 2026 in Social and Personality Psychology! If you are interested in misinformation, political polarization, and/or computational social science, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

I’m recruiting a PhD student in Social Psychology @ TCU for this application cycle!
My lab examines how beliefs and attitudes form, generalize, & shape behavior. We apply this general interest to the study of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and health behavior.

🚨 YA’LL!! HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS PAPER TO COME OUT FOR AGES. IT IS SO SATURN.

I MEAN, IT IS SO GOOD.

SAME THING.

(JUST READ IT)

Our new study: a large-scale RCT showing that standard pedagogical techniques, but also a chatbot (an old school, LLM-less, scripted one!) can help high school students better understand vaccination and develop more positive attitudes.

Truth discernment may not help to overcome misinformation Nature Climate Change - Scientists increasingly assess interventions against misinformation mainly via truth discernment. However, pursuing truth discernment may not be sufficiently beneficial to...

In this new Commentary in @natclimate.nature.com, I reflect on the recent focus on truth discernment in #misinfo research and argue that this outcome alone may not be beneficial to society if interventions do not improve behaviour and other outcomes because... 1/

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint: From vaccinations to masking, politics predicts health behaviors. In this review we discuss these differences in light of classic psychological theories of group identity and behavioral decision-making.

We welcome any feedback on this working paper!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Are you interested in topics related to conflict and intergroup relations *broadly construed*? Come join us as a postdoc in the Dispute Research Research Center! This position is up to 3 years, comes with your own research funding, and a phenomenal network of past DRRC postdocs.

Replicability and generalizability of the repeated exposure effect on moral condemnation of fake news - Nature Communications Repeated exposure to misinformation reduces moral condemnation of sharing those falsehoods online. Here, the authors show that this finding replicates and generalizes to new settings and headlines.

Seeing the same fake news headlines multiple times makes people view sharing them as more acceptable, suggesting that repeated exposure can weaken social norms against spreading misinformation on social media.
www.nature.com/articles/s41... #MisinfoResearch

poster about why we don't stop and think, showing the main results of the study

Curious about the mechanisms behind biased reasoning and metacognition? 🤔

📍 Come see our poster at #CCN2025, Aug 12, 1:30–4:30pm

We show how a biased drift-diffusion model can explain choice, RT and confidence in a base-rate neglect task, revealing why more deliberation doesn’t always fix bias.

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social

It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model

Time for new approaches:
o True/False → Content that misleads
o Belief → Behavior
o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

<em>British Journal of Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library Behavioural science research has the potential to develop evidence-based strategies to fight disinformation about climate science and climate mitigation action; however, this research has yet to be c...

🚨Paper alert

Are you interested in interventions against climate disinformation? In this new paper, we introduce the Climate Disinformation Corpus N = 78 real, validated climate disinformation statements that can be use as exprimental stimuli
bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

1/n

Western University is offering new scholarships of up to 40k CAD for four years to doctoral students who are studying at, have an offer from, or have had an offer rescinded from one of the top 100 American universities.

Come and study with me or one of my colleagues!

Elizabeth Page-Gould recognized with Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology The Society for Experimental Social Psychology has recognized Elizabeth Page-Gould with a Career Trajectory Award in recognition of uniquely creative and influential scholarly productivity.

She is far too un-self-promoting to do this herself, so I'm shouting out *THE* Elizabeth Page-Gould (@page-gould.bsky.social) for winning the SESP Career Trajectory Award!

Liz is the reason they had to invent the high-warmth/high competence quadrant. She is such a gem and so damn deserving of this.

Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy Abstract. This volume introduces a “connection action” framework for explaining democratic backsliding. We bring together a mostly political science compar

Just published: "Unraveling the Big Lie: Participatory Disinformation and the 2020 Election." Thrilled to see this work out in the world and part of such an amazing compilation. My chapter features my initial research and model on "participatory disinformation": academic.oup.com/book/60493?l...

"Defining deliberation for dual-process models of reasoning" is now published. Free online access to the published Nat Rev Psy version: rdcu.be/erM5T

Screenshot of title page of article published in PNAS Nexus titled "Limited effectiveness of psychological inoculation against misinformation in a social media feed."

Improving curation is tough: "Overall, we present evidence that inoculation does not reduce engagement with emotional content and that the benefits of inoculation found in controlled experiments do not transfer to more realistic contexts." #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1093/pnas...