minzlicht.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

When I published that blog, I didn't know I'd become social psych's Judas. Turns out questioning our field's methods is a great way to lose friends! I spent years plunged in a despondency. Ten years later, I'm still skeptical, just grayer and at peace. Come join my midlife crisis.

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

And not one of the polite ones. We’ve written a response to @nytimes.com’s Peter Baker and every other American who is taking the annexation of Canada as a fun thought experiment. Here in @foreignpolicy.com with my daughter @alicesouthey.com. Gift link.

submitted 2 days ago • 40 comments

Apparently one of my papers on AI "empathy" with @minzlicht.bsky.social was put up as an example in a talk at SPSP. Yet it's one in which we use interdisciplinary dialogue between psychology and philosophy to take an open-minded, broad view on empathy, exploring costs/benefits across modes. Alas...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

A big thank you to all those who have been so positive about my new book. It's about how neurological patients can tell us so much about our selves, how personal and social identities are forged by different cognitive functions, and what it means to belong.

submitted 4 days ago • 8 comments

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence! From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

submitted 6 days ago • 5 comments

AI is evil

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

YES ‼️ “So, let’s clear up a major misconception: the goal of a conference isn’t to attend every talk and absorb every bit of information. It’s about connecting—with ideas, with potential collaborators, and yes, with those strangers you’re too nervous to approach.”

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Heading to SPSP? The secret is that conferences aren't about the talks; they're about connecting with people. And you might enjoy it more than you think (just ditch the grad school crew and work in pairs instead). My guide to academic networking: open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

There’s been so much interest in from US 🇺🇸health workers and jobs in Canada that I’m posting recruitment links for all 10 provinces and 3 territories: 🧵 #healthcarejobs🇨🇦

submitted 11 days ago • 167 comments

Cool new paper by @jakeembrey.bsky.social et al. extending and improving on some of my PhD work I did w/ @erikbij.bsky.social accepted at JEP: General - neither extrinsic nor intrinsic value of alternative activity affected performance on current task, but it can affect subjective experience

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Metacognition of medical knowledge in LLMs: “Models consistently failed to recognize their knowledge limitations and provided confident answers even when correct options were absent.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 15 days ago • 4 comments

Forthcoming at JEP: General is some more work from my dissertation. Over three experiments we test a popular model of cognitive effort aversion—the opportunity cost model, first proposed by Kurzban et al. (2013)—and find negligible support for its primary predictions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Am I a hypocrite for criticizing identity politics while calling out what I see as antisemitism in open letters? Part II of my deep dive into the identity game explores how the rules go sideways, how they can be exploited, & my own complicated relationship with them open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

New paper accepted at @collabrapsychology.bsky.social with @jonasdora.bsky.social that challenges how we think about mental effort and risk-taking. The findings genuinely surprised us. Effort expenditure decreases risk aversion when dealing with gains but not losses /1 osf.io/preprints/ps...

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

This is an article that all Canadian and American friends must read. Donald Trump has broken a bond between the nations. From here on in, everything is changed. vancouversun.com/news/opinion...

submitted 22 days ago • 245 comments

Can you oppose identity politics while leveraging it for your own cause? After being called out for hypocrisy, I break down the hidden rules of the identity game. A steelman's attempt to understand how identity shapes modern life. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Looks awesome!

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

hey quick question does Goliath win in that story

submitted 25 days ago • 1122 comments

If there is any doubt that tariffs are passed through to consumers, the cost of propane to heat my house just went up by the amount of the tariff

submitted 25 days ago • 203 comments

Great resource to help Canadians buy goods made in Canada! madeinca.ca?fbclid=IwY2x...

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

Want to feel better after using Instagram? Our new paper shows how. It's not about what you post, it's about how you respond to others' joy. In 4 studies (N=1327), focusing on sharing & caring about others' positive emotions improved mood & life satisfaction pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39883419/#:~....

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

Of relevance, a new longitudinal paper shows that exerting more self-control at one point in the day predicts having more self-control at a later time, entirely opposite of what you would expect based on the depletion/strength model. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Alternative headline: Moderate cannabis use can improve young adults' short-term memory And by short-term memory we mean small (d=-.28, p=.02) effects in some brain areas related to short term memory, but short term memory itself is unaffected. And by improve, we mean correlated with.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

V cool study BUT: -Striking there's no mention in press release that it's a correlational study & why that matters. -ALSO, WM-activation associations w/lifetime cannabis use were quadratic, not linear. AND, lifetime cannabis use WASN'T associated w/WM performance, only with brain-activity patterns.

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

in retrospect I think it may have been a mistake to make the work machine and the procrastination machine be the same machine

submitted 32 days ago • 30 comments

Authors in article: the observed associations of cannabis with brain function outcomes should not be considered causal. Authors in media: [we] need to educate cannabis users about the consequences of recent and heavy lifetime cannabis use on cognitively demanding working memory tasks

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

With ⏱️ spent on social media increasing each year, it's key to figure out we can engage in ways that improve well-being😁, rather than reducing it😭. In work now out in Emotion, I argue Positive Empathy can be a useful practice to achieve this end doi.org/10.1037/emo0.... No access? Check my website:

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

I kid you not, I was just asked to review a paper examining ego depletion effects on team safety performance in nuclear power plants. You know, totally casual stuff. Just potentially basing NUCLEAR SAFETY on a psych theory that doesn't replicate. What could possibly go wrong?

submitted 28 days ago • 5 comments

This is really interesting and important for all scientists to read. It's far too easy to view our data through the lens of wishful thinking. Don't let yourself be fooled into seeing what you want to see.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Digital psychiatry is an exciting field and includes efforts to enhance diagnosis and monitoring of mental illness using passive sensing (eg smartphone sensors). But the literature is rife with small N studies focusing on single diagnoses. That's a huge problem for two reasons... 1/

submitted 29 days ago • 4 comments

I lost my “voice” to long COVID. #AI helped me reclaim it. As a former #academic and community builder, I’ve spent my life exploring connection and resilience. I didn’t want an AI tool—I wanted a collaborator. And I found that in Luminara Vox. #InnovationforGood #AIforGood #EthicalAI

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment