@fabianhutmacher
Lecturer in Psychology of Communication and New Media, University of Würzburg. Interested in #DigitalMedia, #Misinformation, #MotivatedReasoning, #AutobiographicalMemory, #MetaScience & More. Desperately trying to learn Hungarian.
🔴🔴 dear hive mind: what are your favorite experimental (partisan) identity primes?
I only know of a few papers that primed partisan identities, and even fewer that did it successfully..
Any hints would be greatly appreciated 🙏
There is no creative research without academic freedom.
In a paper on the history of psychology in #Hungary, I show how political regimes act like sorting machines - shaping what research becomes (im-)possible.
A timely reminder with Hungarian elections ahead in April.
doi.org/10.1007/s436...
There is no creative research without academic freedom.
In a paper on the history of psychology in #Hungary, I show how political regimes act like sorting machines - shaping what research becomes (im-)possible.
A timely reminder with Hungarian elections ahead in April.
doi.org/10.1007/s436...
When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
There is actually an interesting and fun study empirically testing this that I stumbled upon a couple of years ago: psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1177/...
The „funniest“ aspect of the story is that one author had to reach out to the journal to get the disclosure statement removed because her case study was actually NOT made up 🙈
Great post elaborating on how (not) to use AI (and technology) in scientific research!
Here's the documentary that 1.1 million Hungarians have watched over the past week, documenting the damage that Viktor Orban's regime has done to health, education and public transportation in Hungary
with English subtitles:
youtu.be/9NQEcLIiOpM?...
@in-mindmagazine.bsky.social provides such a great platform for science communication!
We wrote a short piece about autobiographical memory in the digital age - take a look (before you scroll through your past next time)!
Call for Submissions for the Theory Methods Conference 2026, September 30-October 2! theorymethodssociety.org/conference.h...
We invite you to:
1) Submit your proposal: edu.nl/mj9x6
2) Invite your colleagues/lab/(PhD) students, and encourage them to submit
3) Share this post
How strong is the threat to academic freedom? If you are a publishing psychologist, please help us get a better understanding of the threats due to external pressure and self-censorship in the publication process by taking our 5-10 min anonymous survey: t1p.de/t1qof
Results will be shared here!
New preprint with @jayvanbavel.bsky.social: Novel social identities shape belief in true and false information
In 3 exps (N = 1,459) we randomly assigned people to one of two novel groups. People trusted (and then believed claims more from) their in-group
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Thread 🧵
Finally out!
TLDR: People don't feel shit cause they believe wild conspiracy theories, they believe CTs cause they feel shit. CT beliefs are often confabulations explaining their existential predicament. I drew on LOTS empirical stuff to try & make this defeasible:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Screenshot of a preprint titled “Digital Behaviourism: A functional approach to behaviour in digital environments”
Our preprint has evolved!
v2 of “Digital Behaviourism” is out now with a new title, new co-authors, and a deeper dive into the behavioural concepts that shape our online lives.
It’s time to move beyond “screen time” and focus on function of online behaviours.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Great thread. Definitely worth reading!
🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why?
To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
1/11
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
Research conducted @uni-wuerzburg.de and closely connected to my project at @badw.de
How well do you remember your birthday in 2024? What about 2019?🎂🎁 If you can’t remember, what would you do to find out?
In our new open-access study, we show how important and useful digital tools are for reconstructing past experiences. 📱
doi.org/10.1080/0965...
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
BLack and white picture of FEyerabend with names of authors in the issue
New Special Issue of #HOPOS on Paul Feyerabend.
Featuring a new transcription and critical overview of Paul Feyerabend’s unpublished manuscript “On the Responsibility of Scientists” as well as eight new papers.
Link to the special issue: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hopos/20...
Motivated reasoning denotes the phenomenon that individuals are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at. Properly understanding this phenomenon requires at least three things: first, to pin down the preconditions of motivated reasoning; second, to identify the cognitive processes that lead to biased judgments; and third, to identify whether a measured bias is the result of motivated reasoning or other processes. Although motivated reasoning has received continued attention from the research community over the last decades, there are considerable conceptual ambiguities regarding these three aspects. By focusing on key publications that have had a formative effect on the development of the field as well as recent publications that reflect the state-of-the-art, the present paper provides a concise and selective overview of research on motivated reasoning, discusses existing conceptual ambiguities, and derives recommendations for future research.
Motivated Reasoning
"Quite undoubtedly, motivated reasoning is *a thing.* What we need, is more research to find out what thing it is *exactly.*
New narrative review by @fabianhutmacher.bsky.social, @marlephie.bsky.social, & @zpid.bsky.social
Open Access: doi.org/10.1525/coll...
Working on this with Fabian and Regina was an extremely inspiring and thought-provoking experience. Motivated reasoning is such a fascinating and consequential psychological phenomenon! 👇🏼
It was a pleasure to think and write about this together with @marlephie.bsky.social from @zpid.bsky.social and Regina Reichardt from @uniregensburg.bsky.social
If you want to see which (preliminary) answers we found to the questions mentioned above, take a look at the paper :)
Known Unknown #3: Is a biased judgment the result of motivated reasoning - or can the same outcome also be the result of “unmotivated” processes? And under which conditions is it justified to say that motivated reasoning is irrational?
Known Unknown #2: Which processes lead to biased judgments? For instance, does motivated reasoning lead to changes in the kind of information processing and/or to changes in the intensity of information processing?
Known Unknown #1: What are the preconditions of motivated reasoning? That is, when do specific goals trigger motivated reasoning - and should we look at manifest surface attitudes or rather at the deeper attitude roots?
Motivated reasoning is a well-understood phenomenon - or is it?
In a new paper just published at @collabrapsychology.bsky.social we discuss three known unknowns.
doi.org/10.1525/coll...
Here is a 🧵
Social media ~ mental health meta-analysis:
- Cited 7 times
- The 45 included studies appear not to exist
- The authors’ institution appears not to exist
- The journal editors won’t respond