psychology

Research roundup: 6 cool stories we almost missed

animals, Biology, chemistry, fermentation, microbiology, Physics, psychology, robotics, Science, social networks / Rejus Almole / December 1, 2025

The assassination of a Hungarian duke, why woodpeckers grunt when they peck, and more.

Skull of remains found in a 13th century Dominican monastery on Margaret Island, Budapest, Hungary Credit: Eötvös Loránd University

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. November’s list includes forensic details of the medieval assassination of a Hungarian duke, why woodpeckers grunt when they peck, and more evidence that X’s much-maligned community notes might actually help combat the spread of misinformation after all.

An assassinated medieval Hungarian duke

The observed perimortem lesions on the human remains (CL=cranial lesion, PL= Postcranial lesion). The drawing of the skeleton was generated using OpenAI’s image generation tools (DALL·E) via ChatGPT. — Credit: Tamás Hajdu et al., 2026

Back in 1915, archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains of a young man in a Dominican monastery on Margaret Island in Budapest, Hungary. The remains were believed to be those of Duke Bela of Masco, grandson of the medieval Hungarian King Bela IV. Per historical records, the young duke was brutally assassinated in 1272 by a rival faction and his mutilated remains were recovered by the duke’s sister and niece and buried in the monastery.

The identification of the remains was based on a contemporary osteological analysis, but they were subsequently lost and only rediscovered in 2018. A paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics has now confirmed that identification and shed more light on precisely how the duke died. (A preprint is available on bioRxiv.]

An interdisciplinary team of researchers performed various kinds of bioarchaeological analysis on the remains. including genetic testing, proteomics, 3D modeling, and radiocarbon dating. The resulting data definitively proves that the skeleton is indeed that of Duke Bela of Masco.

The authors were also able to reconstruct the manner of the duke’s death, concluding that this was a coordinated attack by three people. One attacked from the front while the other two attacked from the left and right sides, and the duke was facing his assassins and tried to defend himself. The weapons used were most likely a saber and a long sword, and the assassins kept raining down blows even after the duke had fallen to the ground. The authors concluded that while the attack was clearly planned, it was also personal and fueled by rage or hate.

DOI: Forensic Science International: Genetics, 2025. 10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103381 (About DOIs).

Why woodpeckers grunt when they peck

A male Pileated woodpecker foraging on a t

Woodpeckers energetically drum away at tree trunks all day long with their beaks and yet somehow never seem to get concussions, despite the fact that such drumming can produce deceleration forces as high as 1,200 g’s. (Humans suffer concussions with a sudden deceleration of just 100 g’s.) While popular myth holds that woodpecker heads are structured in such a way to absorb the shock, and there has been some science to back that up, more recent research found that their heads act more like hammers than shock absorbers. A paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology sheds further light on the biomechanics of how woodpeckers essentially turn themselves into hammers and reveals that the birds actually grunt as they strike wood.

The authors caught eight wild downy woodpeckers and recorded them drilling and tapping on pieces of hardwood in the lab for three days, while also measuring electrical signals in their heads, necks, abdomens, tails, and leg muscles. Analyzing the footage, they found that woodpeckers use their hip flexors and front neck muscles to propel themselves forward as they peck while tipping their heads back and bracing themselves using muscles at the base of the skull and back of the neck. The birds use abdominal muscles for stability and brace for impact using their tail muscles to anchor their bodies against a tree. As for the grunting, the authors noted that it’s a type of breathing pattern used by tennis players (and martial artists) to boost the power of a strike.

DOI: Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025. 10.1242/jeb.251167 (About DOIs).

Raisins turn water into wine

wine glass half filled with raisins — Credit: Kyoto University

Fermentation has been around in some form for millennia, relying on alcohol-producing yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae; cultured S. cerevisiae is still used by winemakers today. It’s long been thought that winemakers in ancient times stored fresh crushed grapes in jars and relied on natural fermentation to work its magic, but recent studies have called this into question by demonstrating that S. cerevisiae colonies usually don’t form on fresh grape skins. But the yeast does like raisins, as Kyoto University researchers recently discovered. They’ve followed up that earlier work with a paper published in Scientific Reports, demonstrating that it’s possible to use raisins to turn water into wine.

The authors harvested fresh grapes and dried them for 28 days. Some were dried using an incubator, some were sun-dried, and a third batch was dried using a combination of the two methods. The researchers then added the resulting raisins to bottles of water—three samples for each type of drying process—sealed the bottles, and stored them at room temperature for two weeks. One incubator-dried sample and two combo samples successfully fermented, but all three of the sun-dried samples did so, and at higher ethanol concentrations. Future research will focus on identifying the underlying molecular mechanisms. And for those interested in trying this at home, the authors warn that it only works with naturally sun-dried raisins, since store-bought varieties have oil coatings that block fermentation.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2025. 10.1038/s41598-025-23715-3 (About DOIs).

An octopus-inspired pigment

An octopus camouflages itself with the seafloor. — Credit: Charlotte Seid

Octopuses, cuttlefish, and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin’s unique complex structure, including layers of chromatophores, iridophores, and leucophores. A color-shifting natural pigment called xanthommatin also plays a key role, but it’s been difficult to study because it’s hard to harvest enough directly from animals, and lab-based methods of making the pigment are labor-intensive and don’t yield much. Scientists at the University of San Diego have developed a new method for making xanthommatin in substantially larger quantities, according to a paper published in Nature Biotechnology.

The issue is that trying to get microbes to make foreign compounds creates a metabolic burden, and the microbes hence resist the process, hindering yields. The USD team figured out how to trick the cells into producing more xanthommatin by genetically engineering them in such a way that making the pigment was essential to a cell’s survival. They achieved yields of between 1 and 3 grams per liter, compared to just five milligrams of pigment per liter using traditional approaches. While this work is proof of principle, the authors foresee such future applications as photoelectronic devices and thermal coatings, dyes, natural sunscreens, color-changing paints, and environmental sensors. It could also be used to make other kinds of chemicals and help industries shift away from older methods that rely on fossil fuel-based materials.

DOI: Nature Biotechnology, 2025. 10.1038/s41587-025-02867-7 (About DOIs).

A body-swap robot

Participant standing on body-swap balance robot — Credit: Sachi Wickramasinghe/UBC Media Relations

Among the most serious risks facing older adults is falling. According to the authors of a paper published in Science Robotics, standing upright requires the brain to coordinate signals from the eyes, inner ears, and feet to counter gravity, and there’s a natural lag in how fast this information travels back and forth between brain and muscles. Aging and certain diseases like diabetic neuropathy and multiple sclerosis can further delay that vital communication; the authors liken it to steering a car with a wheel that responds half a second late. And it’s a challenge to directly study the brain under such conditions.

That’s why researchers at the University of British Columbia built a large “body swap” robotic platform. Subjects stood on force plates attached to a motor-driven backboard to reproduce the physical forces at play when standing upright: gravity, inertia, and “viscosity,” which in this case describes the damping effect of muscles and joints that allow us to lean without falling. The platform is designed to subtly alter those forces and also add a 200-millisecond delay.

The authors tested 20 participants and found that lowering inertia and making the viscosity negative resulted in similar instability to that which resulted from a signal delay. They then brought in ten new subjects to study whether adjusting body mechanics could compensate for information delays. They found that adding inertia and viscosity could at least partially counter the instability that arose from signal delay—essentially giving the body a small mechanical boost to help the brain maintain balance. The eventual goal is to design wearables that offer gentle resistance when an older person starts to lose their balance, and/or help patients with MS, for example, adjust to slower signal feedback.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2025. 10.1126/scirobotics.adv0496 (About DOIs).

X community notes might actually work

cropped image of phone screen showing an X post with a community note underneath — Credit: Huaxia Rui

Earlier this year, Elon Musk claimed that X’s community notes feature needed tweaking because it was being gamed by “government & legacy media” to contradict Trump—despite vigorously defending the robustness of the feature against such manipulation in the past. A growing body of research seems to back Musk’s earlier stance.

For instance, last year Bloomberg pointed to several studies suggesting that crowdsourcing worked just as well as using professional fact-checkers when assessing the accuracy of news stories. The latest evidence that crowd-sourcing fact checks can be effective at curbing misinformation comes from a paper published in the journal Information Systems Research, which found that X posts with public corrections were 32 percent more likely to be deleted by authors.

Co-author Huaxia Rui of the University of Rochester pointed out that community notes must meet a threshold before they will appear publicly on posts, while those that do not remain hidden from public view. Seeing a prime opportunity in the arrangement, Rui et al. analyzed 264,600 X posts that had received at least one community note and compared those just above and just below that threshold. The posts were collected from two different periods: June through August 2024, right before the US presidential election (when misinformation typically surges), and the post-election period of January and February 2025.

The fact that roughly one-third of authors responded to public community notes by deleting the post suggests that the built-in dynamics of social media (e.g., status, visibility, peer feedback) might actually help improve the spread of misinformation as intended. The authors concluded that crowd-checking “strikes a balance between First Amendment rights and the urgent need to curb misinformation.” Letting AI write the community notes, however, is probably still a bad idea.

DOI: Information Systems Research, 2025. 10.1287/isre.2024.1609 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Do animals fall for optical illusions? It’s complicated.

animal cognition, animal perception, animal psychology, Ebbinghaus illusion, psychology, Science / Kris Guyer / October 20, 2025

A tale of two species

View from above of the apparatuses used for ring doves (A) and guppies (B). Credit: M. Santaca et al., 2025

The authors tested 38 ring doves and 19 guppies (of the “snakeskin cobra green” ornamental strain) for their experiments. The doves were placed in a testing cage with the bottom covered with an anti-slip wooden panel and a branch serving as a perch and starting point; the feeding station was at the opposite end of the cage. The guppies were tested in single tanks with a gravel bottom.

In both cases, the test subjects were presented with visual stimuli in the form of two white plastic cards. Sizes differed for the doves and the guppies, but each card showed an array of six black circles with a bit of food serving as the center “circle”: red millet seeds for the doves and commercial flake food for the guppies. The circles were smaller on one of the cards and larger on the other. The subjects were free to choose food from one of the cards, and the card with the unchosen food was removed promptly. If no choice was made after 15 minutes, the trial was null and the team tried again after a 15-minute interval.

The authors found that the guppies were indeed highly susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion, choosing food surrounded by smaller circles much more frequently, suggesting they perceived it as larger and hence more desirable. The results for ring doves were more mixed, however: some of the doves seemed to be susceptible while others were not, suggesting that their perceptual strategies are more local, detail-oriented, and less influenced by their surrounding context.

“The doves’ mixed responses suggest that individual experience or innate bias can strongly shape how an animal interprets illusions,” the authors concluded. “Just like in humans, where some people are strongly fooled by illusions and others hardly at all, animal perception is not uniform.”

The authors acknowledge that their study has limitations. For instance, guppies and ring doves diverged hundreds of millions of years ago and hence are phylogenetically distant, so the perceptual differences between them could be due not just to ecological pressures, but also to evolutionary traits gained or lost via natural selection. Future experiments involving more closely related species with different sensory environments would better isolate the role of ecological factors in animal perception.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1653695 (About DOIs).

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Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe

cognitive bias, conspiracy theories, culture, false consensus, misinformation, psychology, Science / Tim Belzer / July 23, 2025

Gordon Pennycook: “It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.”

Credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Belief in conspiracy theories is often attributed to some form of motivated reasoning: People want to believe a conspiracy because it reinforces their worldview, for example, or doing so meets some deep psychological need, like wanting to feel unique. However, it might also be driven by overconfidence in their own cognitive abilities, according to a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The authors were surprised to discover that not only are conspiracy theorists overconfident, they also don’t realize their beliefs are on the fringe, massively overestimating by as much as a factor of four how much other people agree with them.

“I was expecting the overconfidence finding,” co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, told Ars. “If you’ve talked to someone who believes conspiracies, it’s self-evident. I did not expect them to be so ready to state that people agree with them. I thought that they would overestimate, but I didn’t think that there’d be such a strong sense that they are in the majority. It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.”

In 2015, Pennycook made headlines when he co-authored a paper demonstrating how certain people interpret “pseudo-profound bullshit” as deep observations. Pennycook et al. were interested in identifying individual differences between those who are susceptible to pseudo-profound BS and those who are not and thus looked at conspiracy beliefs, their degree of analytical thinking, religious beliefs, and so forth.

They presented several randomly generated statements, containing “profound” buzzwords, that were grammatically correct but made no sense logically, along with a 2014 tweet by Deepak Chopra that met the same criteria. They found that the less skeptical participants were less logical and analytical in their thinking and hence much more likely to consider these nonsensical statements as being deeply profound. That study was a bit controversial, in part for what was perceived to be its condescending tone, along with questions about its methodology. But it did snag Pennycook et al. a 2016 Ig Nobel Prize.

Last year we reported on another Pennycook study, presenting results from experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory. That study showed that the AI interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual. “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they’re the result of various psychological motives and needs,” Pennycook said at the time.

Miscalibrated from reality

Pennycook has been working on this new overconfidence study since 2018, perplexed by observations indicating that people who believe in conspiracies also seem to have a lot of faith in their cognitive abilities—contradicting prior research finding that conspiracists are generally more intuitive. To investigate, he and his co-authors conducted eight separate studies that involved over 4,000 US adults.

The assigned tasks were designed in such a way that participants’ actual performance and how they perceived their performance were unrelated. For example, in one experiment, they were asked to guess the subject of an image that was largely obscured. The subjects were then asked direct questions about their belief (or lack thereof) concerning several key conspiracy claims: the Apollo Moon landings were faked, for example, or that Princess Diana’s death wasn’t an accident. Four of the studies focused on testing how subjects perceived others’ beliefs.

The results showed a marked association between subjects’ tendency to be overconfident and belief in conspiracy theories. And while a majority of participants believed a conspiracy’s claims just 12 percent of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93 percent of the time. This suggests that overconfidence is a primary driver of belief in conspiracies.

It’s not that believers in conspiracy theories are massively overconfident; there is no data on that, because the studies didn’t set out to quantify the degree of overconfidence, per Pennycook. Rather, “They’re overconfident, and they massively overestimate how much people agree with them,” he said.

Ars spoke with Pennycook to learn more.

Ars Technica: Why did you decide to investigate overconfidence as a contributing factor to believing conspiracies?

Gordon Pennycook: There’s a popular sense that people believe conspiracies because they’re dumb and don’t understand anything, they don’t care about the truth, and they’re motivated by believing things that make them feel good. Then there’s the academic side, where that idea molds into a set of theories about how needs and motivations drive belief in conspiracies. It’s not someone falling down the rabbit hole and getting exposed to misinformation or conspiratorial narratives. They’re strolling down: “I like it over here. This appeals to me and makes me feel good.”

Believing things that no one else agrees with makes you feel unique. Then there’s various things I think that are a little more legitimate: People join communities and there’s this sense of belongingness. How that drives core beliefs is different. Someone may stop believing but hang around in the community because they don’t want to lose their friends. Even with religion, people will go to church when they don’t really believe. So we distinguish beliefs from practice.

What we observed is that they do tend to strongly believe these conspiracies despite the fact that there’s counter evidence or a lot of people disagree. What would lead that to happen? It could be their needs and motivations, but it could also be that there’s something about the way that they think where it just doesn’t occur to them that they could be wrong about it. And that’s where overconfidence comes in.

Ars Technica: What makes this particular trait such a powerful driving force?

Gordon Pennycook: Overconfidence is one of the most important core underlying components, because if you’re overconfident, it stops you from really questioning whether the thing that you’re seeing is right or wrong, and whether you might be wrong about it. You have an almost moral purity of complete confidence that the thing you believe is true. You cannot even imagine what it’s like from somebody else’s perspective. You couldn’t imagine a world in which the things that you think are true could be false. Having overconfidence is that buffer that stops you from learning from other people. You end up not just going down the rabbit hole, you’re doing laps down there.

Overconfidence doesn’t have to be learned, parts of it could be genetic. It also doesn’t have to be maladaptive. It’s maladaptive when it comes to beliefs. But you want people to think that they will be successful when starting new businesses. A lot of them will fail, but you need some people in the population to take risks that they wouldn’t take if they were thinking about it in a more rational way. So it can be optimal at a population level, but maybe not at an individual level.

Ars Technica: Is this overconfidence related to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect?

Gordon Pennycook: It’s because of Dunning-Kruger that we had to develop a new methodology to measure overconfidence, because the people who are the worst at a task are the worst at knowing that they’re the worst at the task. But that’s because the same things that you use to do the task are the things you use to assess how good you are at the task. So if you were to give someone a math test and they’re bad at math, they’ll appear overconfident. But if you give them a test of assessing humor and they’re good at that, they won’t appear overconfident. That’s about the task, not the person.

So we have tasks where people essentially have to guess, and it’s transparent. There’s no reason to think that you’re good at the task. In fact, people who think they’re better at the task are not better at it, they just think they are. They just have this underlying kind of sense that they can do things, they know things, and that’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to capture. It’s not specific to a domain. There are lots of reasons why you could be overconfident in a particular domain. But this is something that’s an actual trait that you carry into situations. So when you’re scrolling online and come up with these ideas about how the world works that don’t make any sense, it must be everybody else that’s wrong, not you.

Ars Technica: Overestimating how many people agree with them seems to be at odds with conspiracy theorists’ desire to be unique.

Gordon Pennycook: In general, people who believe conspiracies often have contrary beliefs. We’re working with a population where coherence is not to be expected. They say that they’re in the majority, but it’s never a strong majority. They just don’t think that they’re in a minority when it comes to the belief. Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.

So they’re way off. They really, really miscalibrated. But they don’t say 90 percent. It’s 60 percent, enough to be special, but not enough to be on the fringe where they actually are. I could have asked them to rank how smart they are relative to others, or how unique they thought their beliefs were, and they would’ve answered high on that. But those are kind of mushy self-concepts. When you ask a specific question that has an objectively correct answer in terms of the percent of people in the sample that agree with you, it’s not close.

Ars Technica: How does one even begin to combat this? Could last year’s AI study point the way?

Gordon Pennycook: The AI debunking effect works better for people who are less overconfident. In those experiments, very detailed, specific debunks had a much bigger effect than people expected. After eight minutes of conversation, a quarter of the people who believed the thing didn’t believe it anymore, but 75 percent still did. That’s a lot. And some of them, not only did they still believe it, they still believed it to the same degree. So no one’s cracked that. Getting any movement at all in the aggregate was a big win.

Here’s the problem. You can’t have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t want to have the conversation. In those studies, we’re paying people, but they still get out what they put into the conversation. If you don’t really respond or engage, then our AI is not going to give you good responses because it doesn’t know what you’re thinking. And if the person is not willing to think. … This is why overconfidence is such an overarching issue. The only alternative is some sort of propagandistic sit-them-downs with their eyes open and try to de-convert them. But you can’t really convert someone who doesn’t want to be converted. So I’m not sure that there is an answer. I think that’s just the way that humans are.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025. DOI: 10.1177/01461672251338358 (About DOIs).

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Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care

incel culture, incels, manosphere, psychology, Science, sociology / Kris Guyer / May 31, 2025

“Don’t work for Soyciety”

A growing number of incels are NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). That should concern us all.

The Netlix series Adolescence explores the roots of misogynistic subcultures. Credit: Netflix

The online incel (“involuntary celibate”) subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

Contrary to how it’s often portrayed, the “manosphere,” as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the “Redpill” ideology, for example, might insist that women control the “sexual marketplace” and are only interested in ultramasculine “Chads.” They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women.

By contrast, the “Blackpilled” incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one’s looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

“People have a tendency to lump all these different groups together as the manosphere,” co-author AnnaRose Beckett-Herbert of McGill University told Ars. “One critique I have of the recent Netflix show Adolescence—which was well done overall—is they lump incels in with figures like Andrew Tate, as though it’s all interchangeable. There’s areas of overlap, like extreme misogyny, but there are really important distinctions. We have to be careful to make those distinctions because the kind of intervention or prevention efforts that we might direct towards the Redpill community versus the Blackpill community might be very different.”

Incels constitute a fairly small fraction of the manosphere, but the vast majority of incels appear to embrace the Blackpill ideology, per Beckett-Herbert. That nihilistic attitude can extend to any kind of participation in what incels term “Soyciety”—including educational attainment and employment. When that happens, such individuals are best described by the acronym NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).

“It’s not that we have large swaths of young men that are falling into this rabbit hole,” said Beckett-Herbert. “Their ideology is pretty fringe, but we’re seeing the community grow, and we’re seeing the ideology spread. It used to be contained to romantic relationships and sex. Now we’re seeing this broader disengagement from society as a whole. We should all be concerned about that trend.”

The NEET trend is also tied to the broader cultural discourse on how boys and young men are struggling in contemporary society. While prior studies tended to focus on the misogynistic rhetoric and propensity for violence among incels, “I thought that the unemployment lens was interesting because it’s indicative of larger problems,” said Beckett-Herbert. “It’s important to remember that it’s not zero-sum. We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don’t have to be at odds.”

“Lie down and rot”

Beckett-Herbert and her advisor/co-author, McGill University sociologist Eran Shor, chose the incels.is platform as a data source for their study due to its ease of public access and relatively high traffic, with nearly 20,000 members. The pair used Python code to scrape 100 pages, amounting to around 10,000 discussion threads between October and December 2022. A pilot study revealed 10 keywords that appeared most frequently in those threads: “study,” “school,” “NEET,” “job,” “work,” “money,” “career,” “wage,” “employ,” and “rot.” (“They use the phrase ‘lie down and rot’ a lot,” said Beckett-Herbert.)

This allowed Beckett-Herbert and Shor to narrow their sample down to 516 threads with titles containing those keywords. They randomly selected a subset of 171 discussion threads for further study. That analysis yielded four main themes that dominated the discussion threads: political/ideological arguments about being NEET; boundary policing; perceived discrimination; and bullying and marginalization.

Roughly one-quarter of the total comments consisted of political or ideological arguments promoting being NEET, with most commenters advocating minimizing one’s contributions to society as much as possible. They suggested going on welfare, for instance, to “take back” from society, or declared they should be exempt from paying any taxes, as “compensation for our suffering.” About 25 percent—a vocal minority—pushed back on glorifying the NEET lifestyle and offered concrete suggestions for self-improvement. (“Go outside and try at least,” one user commented.)

Such pushback often led to boundary policing. Those who do pursue jobs or education run the risk of being dubbed “fakecels” and becoming alienated from the rest of the incel community. (“Don’t work for a society that hates you,” one user commented.) “There’s a lot of social psychological research on groupthink and group polarization that is relevant here,” said Beckett-Herbert. “A lot of these young men may not have friends in their real life. This community is often their one source of social connection. So the incel ideology becomes core to their identity: ‘I’m part of this community, and we don’t work. We are subhumans.'”

There were also frequent laments about being discriminated against for not being attractive (“lookism”), both romantically and professionally, as well as deep resentment of women’s increased presence in the workplace, deemed a threat to men’s own success. “They love to cherry-pick all these findings from psychology research [to support their position],” said Beckett-Herbert. For instance, “There is evidence that men who are short or not conventionally attractive are discriminated against in hiring. But there’s also a lot of evidence suggesting that this actually affects women more. Women who are overweight face a greater bias against them in hiring than men do, for example.”

Beckett-Herbert and Shor also found that about 15 percent of the comments in their sample concerned users’ experiences being harassed or bullied (usually by other men), their mental health challenges (anxiety, depression), and feeling estranged or ostracized at school or work—experiences that cemented their reluctance to work or engage in education or vocational training.

Many of these users also mentioned being autistic, in keeping with prior research showing a relatively high share of people with autism in incel communities. The authors were careful to clarify, however, that most people with autism “are not violent or hateful, nor do they identify as incels or hold explicitly misogynistic views,” they wrote. “Rather, autism, when combined with other mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, may make young men more vulnerable to incel ideologies.”

There are always caveats. In this case, the study was limited to a single incel forum, which might not be broadly representative of similar discussions on other platforms. And there could be a bit of selection bias at play. Not every incel member may actively participate in discussion threads (lurkers) and non-NEET incels might be less likely to do so either because they have less free time or don’t wish to be dismissed as “fakecels.”However, Beckett-Herbert and Shor note that their findings are consistent with previous studies that suggest there are a disproportionately large number of NEETs within the incel community.

A pound of prevention

Is effective intervention even possible for members of the incel community, given their online echo chamber? Beckett-Herbert acknowledges that it is very difficult to break through to such people. “De-radicalization is a noble, worthy line of research,” she said. “But the existing evidence from that field of study suggests that prevention is easier and more effective than trying to pull these people out once they’re already in.” Potential strategies might include fostering better digital and media literacy, i.e., teaching kids to be cognizant of the content they’re consuming online. Exposure time is another key issue.

“A lot of these young people don’t have healthy outlets that are not in the digital world,” said Beckett-Herbert “They come home from school and spend hours and hours online. They’re lonely and isolated from real-world communities and structures. Some of these harmful ideologies might be downstream of these larger root causes. How can we help boys do better in school, feel better prepared for the labor market? How can we help them make more friends? How can we get them involved in real-world activities that will diminish their time spent online? I think that that can go a long way. Just condemning them or banning their spaces—that’s not a good long-term solution.”

While there are multiple well-publicized instances of self-identified incels committing violent acts—most notably Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014—Beckett-Herbert emphasizes not losing sight of incels’ fundamental humanity. “We focus a lot on the misogyny, the potential for violence against women, and that is so important,” she said. “You will not hear me saying we should not focus on that. But we also should note that statistically, an incel is much more likely to commit suicide or be violent towards themselves than they are toward someone else. You can both condemn their ideology and find it abhorrent and also remember that we need to have empathy for these people.”

Many people—women especially—might find that a tall order, and Beckett-Herbert understands that reluctance. “I do understand people’s hesitancy to empathize with them, because it feels like you’re giving credence to their rhetoric,” she said. “But at the end of the day, they are human, and a lot of them are really struggling, marginalized people coming from pretty sad backgrounds. When you peruse their online world, it’s the most horrifying, angering misogyny right next to some of the saddest mental health, suicidal, low self-esteem stuff you’ve ever seen. I think humanizing them and having empathy is going to be foundational to any intervention efforts to reintegrate them. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot.”

Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care Read More »

How the language of job postings can attract rule-bending narcissists

hiring, narcississm, psychology, Science, Social science, syndication / Kris Guyer / March 23, 2025

Why it matters

Companies write job postings carefully in hopes of attracting the ideal candidate. However, they may unknowingly attract and select narcissistic candidates whose goals and ethics might not align with a company’s values or long-term success. Research shows that narcissistic employees are more likely to behave unethically, potentially leading to legal consequences.

While narcissistic traits can lead to negative outcomes, we aren’t saying that companies should avoid attracting narcissistic applicants altogether. Consider a company hiring a salesperson. A firm can benefit from a salesperson who is persuasive, who “thinks outside the box,” and who is “results-oriented.” In contrast, a company hiring an accountant or compliance officer would likely benefit from someone who “thinks methodically” and “communicates in a straightforward and accurate manner.”

Bending the rules is of particular concern in accounting. A significant amount of research examines how accounting managers sometimes bend rules or massage the numbers to achieve earnings targets. This “earnings management” can misrepresent the company’s true financial position.

In fact, my co-author Nick Seybert is currently working on a paper whose data suggests rule-bender language in accounting job postings predicts rule-bending in financial reporting.

Our current findings shed light on the importance of carefully crafting job posting language. Recruiting professionals may instinctively use rule-bender language to try to attract someone who seems like a good fit. If companies are concerned about hiring narcissists, they may want to clearly communicate their ethical values and needs while crafting a job posting, or avoid rule-bender language entirely.

What still isn’t known

While we find that professional recruiters are using language that attracts narcissists, it is unclear whether this is intentional.

Additionally, we are unsure what really drives rule-bending in a company. Rule-bending could happen due to attracting and hiring more narcissistic candidates, or it could be because of a company’s culture—or a combination of both.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jonathan Gay is Assistant Professor of Accountancy at the University of Mississippi.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the language of job postings can attract rule-bending narcissists Read More »

Do these dual images say anything about your personality?

Big Five, human perception, illusion, Personality types, psychology, Science / Paul Patrick / March 5, 2025

There’s little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It’s possible to perceive both images by shifting one’s perspective, but it’s the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.

But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.

In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the “rabbit-duck illusion,” in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one’s perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.

Such images have long fascinated scientists and philosophers because they seem to represent different ways of seeing. So naturally there is a substantial body of research drawing parallels between such images and various sociological, biological, or psychological characteristics.

For instance, a 2010 study examined BBC archival data on the duck-rabbit illusion from the 1950s and found that men see the duck more often than women, while older people were more likely to see the rabbit. A 2018 study of the “younger-older woman” ambiguous image asked participants to estimate the age of the woman they saw in the image. Older participants over 30 gave higher estimates than younger ones. This was confirmed by a 2021 study, although that study also found no correlation between participants’ age and whether they were more likely to see the older or younger woman in the image.

Do these dual images say anything about your personality? Read More »

Heroes, villains, and childhood trauma in the MCEU and DCU

adverse childhood experiences, DCEU, Entertainment, mcu, Mental Health, psychology, Science, sociology / Rejus Almole / January 16, 2025

They also limited their study to Marvel and DC characters depicted in major films, rather than including storylines from spinoff TV series. So Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlet Witch was not included since much of her traumatic backstory appeared in the series WandaVision. Furthermore, “We omitted gathering more characters from comic books in both Marvel and DC universes, due to their inconsistency in character development,” the authors wrote. “Comic book storylines often feature alternative plot lines, character arcs, and multiverse outcomes. The storytelling makes comic book characters highly inconsistent and challenging to score.”

With great power…

They ended up watching 33 films, with a total runtime of 77 hours and 5 minutes. They chose 19 male characters, eight female characters, and one gender-fluid character (Loki) as “subjects” for their study, applying the ACE questionnaire to their childhoods as portrayed in the films.

The results: “We found no statistically significant differences between heroes and villains, Marvel and DC characters, or men and women and ACE scores,” said Jackson. “This means that characters who were portrayed as having difficult childhoods were not more likely to be villains. This study somewhat refutes the idea that villains are a product of their experiences. Based on the films we watched, people chose to be heroes and that was what made the difference—not their experiences.”

Notably, Black Widow had the highest ACE score (eight) and yet still became an Avenger, though the authors acknowledge that the character did some bad things before then and famously wanted to wipe out the “red” in her ledger. She “represents resilience of characters who have experienced trauma,” the authors wrote, as well as demonstrating that “socio-ecological resilience, including access to social relationships and supportive communities, can play a mitigating role in the effect of ACEs.” The Joker, by contrast, scored a six and “wreaked havoc across Gotham City.”

Heroes, villains, and childhood trauma in the MCEU and DCU Read More »

AI chatbots might be better at swaying conspiracy theorists than humans

AI, ai chatbots, conspiracy theories, large langauge models, psychology, Science / Paul Patrick / September 12, 2024

Out of the rabbit hole —

Co-author Gordon Pennycook: “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies.”

Jennifer Ouellette – Sep 12, 2024 6: 00 pm UTC

Enlarge / A woman wearing a sweatshirt for the QAnon conspiracy theory on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York.

Stephanie Keith | Getty Images

Belief in conspiracy theories is rampant, particularly in the US, where some estimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the population believes in at least one outlandish claim. And those beliefs are notoriously difficult to debunk. Challenge a committed conspiracy theorist with facts and evidence, and they’ll usually just double down—a phenomenon psychologists usually attribute to motivated reasoning, i.e., a biased way of processing information.

A new paper published in the journal Science is challenging that conventional wisdom, however. Experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory showed that the interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual.

“These are some of the most fascinating results I’ve ever seen,” co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, said during a media briefing. “The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they’re the result of various psychological motives and needs. [Participants] were remarkably responsive to evidence. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about being in a post-truth world. It’s really validating to know that evidence does matter. We can act in a more adaptive way using this new technology to get good evidence in front of people that is specifically relevant to what they think, so it’s a much more powerful approach.”

When confronted with facts that challenge a deeply entrenched belief, people will often seek to preserve it rather than update their priors (in Bayesian-speak) in light of the new evidence. So there has been a good deal of pessimism lately about ever reaching those who have plunged deep down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, which are notoriously persistent and “pose a serious threat to democratic societies,” per the authors. Pennycook and his fellow co-authors devised an alternative explanation for that stubborn persistence of belief.

Bespoke counter-arguments

The issue is that “conspiracy theories just vary a lot from person to person,” said co-author Thomas Costello, a psychologist at American University who is also affiliated with MIT. “They’re quite heterogeneous. People believe a wide range of them and the specific evidence that people use to support even a single conspiracy may differ from one person to another. So debunking attempts where you try to argue broadly against a conspiracy theory are not going to be effective because people have different versions of that conspiracy in their heads.”

By contrast, an AI chatbot would be able to tailor debunking efforts to those different versions of a conspiracy. So in theory a chatbot might prove more effective in swaying someone from their pet conspiracy theory.

To test their hypothesis, the team conducted a series of experiments with 2,190 participants who believed in one or more conspiracy theories. The participants engaged in several personal “conversations” with a large language model (GT-4 Turbo) in which they shared their pet conspiracy theory and the evidence they felt supported that belief. The LLM would respond by offering factual and evidence-based counter-arguments tailored to the individual participant. GPT-4 Turbo’s responses were professionally fact-checked, which showed that 99.2 percent of the claims it made were true, with just 0.8 percent being labeled misleading, and zero as false. (You can try your hand at interacting with the debunking chatbot here.)

Enlarge / Screenshot of the chatbot opening page asking questions to prepare for a conversation

Thomas H. Costello

Participants first answered a series of open-ended questions about the conspiracy theories they strongly believed and the evidence they relied upon to support those beliefs. The AI then produced a single-sentence summary of each belief, for example, “9/11 was an inside job because X, Y, and Z.” Participants would rate the accuracy of that statement in terms of their own beliefs and then filled out a questionnaire about other conspiracies, their attitude toward trusted experts, AI, other people in society, and so forth.

Then it was time for the one-on-one dialogues with the chatbot, which the team programmed to be as persuasive as possible. The chatbot had also been fed the open-ended responses of the participants, which made it better to tailor its counter-arguments individually. For example, if someone thought 9/11 was an inside job and cited as evidence the fact that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel, the chatbot might counter with, say, the NIST report showing that steel loses its strength at much lower temperatures, sufficient to weaken the towers’ structures so that it collapsed. Someone who thought 9/11 was an inside job and cited demolitions as evidence would get a different response tailored to that.

Participants then answered the same set of questions after their dialogues with the chatbot, which lasted about eight minutes on average. Costello et al. found that these targeted dialogues resulted in a 20 percent decrease in the participants’ misinformed beliefs—a reduction that persisted even two months later when participants were evaluated again.

As Bence Bago (Tilburg University) and Jean-Francois Bonnefon (CNRS, Toulouse, France) noted in an accompanying perspective, this is a substantial effect compared to the 1 to 6 percent drop in beliefs achieved by other interventions. They also deemed the persistence of the effect noteworthy, while cautioning that two months is “insufficient to completely eliminate misinformed conspiracy beliefs.”

AI chatbots might be better at swaying conspiracy theorists than humans Read More »

Study: Playing Dungeons & Dragons helps autistic players in social interactions

autism, Dungeons and Dragons, neurodivergence, psychology, Science, tabletop gaming / Paul Patrick / September 5, 2024

We can be heroes —

“I can make a character quite different from how I interact with people in real life.”

Jennifer Ouellette – Sep 5, 2024 9: 40 pm UTC

A Dungeons & Dragons game session featuring a map, miniatures, dice, and character sheets — Enlarge / Researchers say that *Dungeons & Dragons* can give autistic players a way to engage in low-risk social interactions.

Since its introduction in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons has become one of the most influential tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in popular culture, featuring heavily in Stranger Things, for example, and spawning a blockbuster movie released last year. Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players’ confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.

“There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren’t socially motivated, or don’t have any imagination,” said co-author Gray Atherton, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. “Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives.”

Prior research has shown that autistic people are more likely to feel lonely, have smaller social networks, and often experience anxiety in social settings. Their desire for social connection leads many to “mask” their neurodivergent traits in public for fear of being rejected as a result of social gaffes. “I think every autistic person has had multiple instances of social rejection and loss of relationships,” one of the study participants said when Atherton et al. interviewed them about their experiences. “You’ve done something wrong. You don’t know what it is. They don’t tell you, and you find out when you’ve been just, you know, left shunned in relationships, left out…. It’s traumatic.”

TPRGs like D&D can serve as a social lubricant for autistic players, according to a year-long study published earlier this year co-authored by Atherton, because there is less uncertainty around how to behave in-game—unlike the plethora of unwritten social rules that make navigating social settings so anxiety-inducing. Such games immerse players in a fantastical world where they create their characters with unique backstories, strengths, and weaknesses and cooperate with others to complete campaigns. A game master guides the overall campaign, but the game itself evolves according to the various choices different players make throughout.

A critical hit

Small wonder, then, that there tend to be higher percentages of autistic TRPG players than in the general populace. For this latest study. Atherton et al. wanted to specifically investigate how autistic players experience D&D when playing in groups with other autistic players. It’s essentially a case study with a small sample size—just eight participants—and qualitative in nature, since the post-play analysis focused on semistructured interviews with each player after the conclusion of the online campaign, the better to highlight their individual voices.

The players were recruited through social media advertisements within the D&D, Reddit and Discord online communities; all had received an autism diagnosis by a medical professional. They were split into two groups of four players, with one of the researchers (who’s been playing D&D for years) acting as the dungeon master. The online sessions featured in the study was the Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The campaign ran for six weeks, with sessions lasting between two and four hours (including breaks).

Participants spoke repeatedly about the positive benefits they received from playing D&D, providing a friendly environment that helped them relax about social pressures. “When you’re interacting with people over D&D, you’re more likely to understand what’s going on,” one participant said in their study interview. “That’s because the method you’ll use to interact is written out. You can see what you’re meant to do. There’s an actual sort of reference sheet for some social interactions.” That, in turn, helped foster a sense of belonging and kinship with their fellow players.

Participants also reported feeling emotionally invested and close to their characters, with some preferring to separate themselves from their character in order to explore other aspects of their personality or even an entirely new persona, thus broadening their perspectives. “I can make a character quite different from how I interact with people in real-life interactions,” one participant said. “It helps you put yourself in the other person’s perspective because you are technically entering a persona that is your character. You can then try to see how it feels to be in that interaction or in that scenario through another lens.” And some participants said they were able to “rewrite” their own personal stories outside the game by adopting some of their characters’ traits—a psychological phenomenon known as “bleed.”

“Autism comes with several stigmas, and that can lead to people being met with judgment or disdain,” said co-author Liam Cross, also of the University of Plymouth. “We also hear from lots of families who have concerns about whether teenagers with autism are spending too much time playing things like video games. A lot of the time that is because people have a picture in their minds of how a person with autism should behave, but that is based on neurotypical experiences. Our studies have shown that there are everyday games and hobbies that autistic people do not simply enjoy but also gain confidence and other skills from. It might not be the case for everyone with autism, but our work suggests it can enable people to have positive experiences that are worth celebrating.”

Autism, 2024. DOI: 10.1177/13623613241275260 (About DOIs).

Study: Playing Dungeons & Dragons helps autistic players in social interactions Read More »

The nature of consciousness, and how to enjoy it while you can

altered, consciousness, Neuroscience, psychedelics, psychology, Science / Mike M. / May 18, 2024

Remaining aware —

In his new book, Christof Koch views consciousness as a theorist and an aficionado.

Lindsey Laughlin – May 18, 2024 11: 31 am UTC

A black background with multicolored swirls filling the shape of a human brain.

Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, “That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.” His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

Billions of neurons exist in the cerebellum, but they are wired “with nonoverlapping inputs and outputs … in a feed-forward manner,” writes Koch. He argues that a structure designed in this way, with limited influence over its own future, is not likely to produce consciousness. Similarly, the prefrontal cortex might allow us to perform complex calculations and exhibit advanced reasoning skills, but such traits do not equate to a capacity to experience life. It is the “reverberatory, self-sustaining excitatory loops prevalent in the neocortex,” Koch tells us, that set the stage for subjective experience to arise.

This declaration matches the experimental evidence Koch presents in Chapter 6: Injuries to the cerebellum do not eliminate a person’s awareness of themselves in relation to the outside world. Consciousness remains, even in a person who can no longer move their body with ease. Yet injuries to the posterior hot zone within the neocortex significantly change a person’s perception of auditory, visual, and tactile information, altering what they subjectively experience and how they describe these experiences to themselves and others.

Does this mean that artificial computer systems, wired appropriately, can be conscious? Not necessarily, Koch says. This might one day be possible with the advent of new technology, but we are not there yet. He writes. “The high connectivity [in a human brain] is very different from that found in the central processing unit of any digital computer, where one transistor typically connects to a handful of other transistors.” For the foreseeable future, AI systems will remain unconscious despite appearances to the contrary.

Koch’s eloquent overview of IIT and the melodic ease of his neuroscientific explanations are undeniably compelling, even for die-hard physicalists who flinch at terms like “self-influence.” His impeccably written descriptions are peppered with references to philosophers, writers, musicians, and psychologists—Albert Camus, Viktor Frankl, Richard Wagner, and Lewis Carroll all make appearances, adding richness and relatability to the narrative. For example, as an introduction to phenomenology—the way an experience feels or appears—he aptly quotes Eminem: “I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.”

The nature of consciousness, and how to enjoy it while you can Read More »

Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired

Harvard, Human behavior, lawsuit, psychology, research misconduct, Science / Kris Guyer / March 15, 2024

Image of a campus of red brick buildings with copper roofs. — Enlarge / Harvard’s got a lawsuit on its hands.

Glowimages

Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to needlessly wreck someone’s career. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.

But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor who had been accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator’s report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.

We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we’ll be updating our original coverage accordingly.

Misconduct allegations lead to lawsuit

Gino, currently on administrative leave, had been faculty at Harvard Business School, where she did research on human behavior. One of her more prominent studies (the one we covered) suggested that signing a form before completing it caused people to fill in its contents more accurately than if they filled out the form first and then signed it.

Oddly, for a paper about honesty, it had a number of issues. Some of its original authors had attempted to go back and expand on the paper but found they were unable to replicate the results. That seems to have prompted a group of behavioral researchers who write at the blog Data Colada to look more carefully at the results that didn’t replicate, at which point they found indications that the data was fabricated. That got the paper retracted.

Gino was not implicated in the fabrication of the data. But the attention of the Data Colada team (Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons) had been drawn to the paper. They found additional indications of completely independent problems in other data from the paper that did come from her work, which caused them to examine additional papers from Gino, coming up with evidence for potential research fraud in four of them.

Before posting it on their blog, however, the Data Colada team had provided their evidence to Harvard, which launched its own investigation. Their posts came out after Harvard’s investigation concluded that Gino’s research had serious issues, and she was placed on administrative leave as the university looked into revoking her tenure. It also alerted the journals that had published the three yet-to-be-retracted papers about the issues.

Things might have ended there, except that Gino filed a defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team, claiming they “worked together to destroy my career and reputation despite admitting they have no evidence proving their allegations.” As part of the $25 million suit, she also accused Harvard of mishandling its investigation and not following proper procedures.

Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired Read More »

How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

12 days of Christmas, books, cognitive bias, cognitive science, human cognition, psychology, Science, science of cons / Mike M. / January 5, 2024

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of <em> Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fool1-800×531.jpg”></img><figcaption>
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There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, “Gorillas in Our Midst“—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.

“People love reading about cons, yet they keep happening,” Simons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What is it those cons are tapping into? Why do we not learn from reading about Theranos? We realized there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply across all of the domains, from cheating in sports and chess to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme.”

Ars spoke with Simons and Chabris to learn more.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for basic scams like the Nigerian Prince scam. It reminds me of Fox Mulder’s poster on The X-Files: “I want to believe.“

Daniel Simons: The Nigerian Prince scam is an interesting one because it’s been around forever. Its original form was in letters. Most people don’t get fooled by that one. The vast majority of people look at it and say, this thing is written in terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anybody believe that they’re the one to recover this vast fortune? So there are some people who fall for it, but it’s a tiny percentage of people. I think it’s still illustrative because that one is obviously too good to be true for most people, but there’s some small subset of people for whom it’s just good enough. It’s just appealing enough to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I could become rich.”

There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who fell for it. There are people who, for whatever reason, are either desperate or have the idea that they deserve to inherit a lot of money. But there are a lot of scams that are much less obvious than that one, selecting for the people who are most naive about it. I think the key insight there is that we tend to assume that only gullible people fall for this stuff. That is fundamentally wrong. We all fall for this stuff if it’s framed in the right way.

Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily people who always want to believe. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people might want to believe that they can strike it rich in crypto, but they would never fall for a Nigerian email or, for that matter, they might not fall for a traditional Ponzi scheme because they don’t believe in fiat money or the stock market. Going back to the Invisible Gorilla, one thing we noticed was a lot of people would ask us, “What’s the difference between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn’t notice the gorilla?” The answer is, well, some of them happened to notice it and some of them didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So in the case of the Nigerian email, there might’ve been something going on in that guy’s life at that moment when he got that email that maybe led him to initially accept the premise as true, even though he knew it seemed kind of weird. Then, he got committed to the idea once he started interacting with these people.

So one of our principles is commitment: the idea that if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that. So, if you somehow actually get convinced that these guys in Nigeria are real, that can explain the bad decisions you make after that. I think there’s a lot of unpredictableness about it. We all need to understand how these things work. We might think it sounds crazy and we would never fall for it, but we might if it was a different scam at a different time.

How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons Read More »