🚨Out today in PNAS @PNASNews🚨 https://t.co/J4gBSBjOtw Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)? We analyze 100k estimates to find out🧵👇

UNC Political Science is hiring in methods! UNC has an amazing department and the triangle is a great place to live. Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Methods (Deadline Oct 24) link to the posting👇 https://t.co/N8tTDEXrQN #psjobs #poliscijobs

Great place with great people! 👇

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruz_fcorreia and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

Popular ChatGPT keywords suggest AI use for writing political science academic articles https://t.co/OttrsXs2ff

🚨 My first solo-authored article is out now at @BJPolS 🚨 tl;dr: When people w/ high verbal ability consume info, their ideological constraint and stability go up. But when people w/ low verabl ability consume info, constraint and stability go *down* https://t.co/DkfxJdqRZC 🧵

Thanks to my fantastic co-authors @TylerMarghetis @DrDavidLandy and Cara Wong, and everyone who gave us feedback over many years Ungated earlier version of the paper here:

Our findings suggest that the public knows more about politics than we give them credit for: People make errors when estimating politically-relevant percentages, but this is due to the format of the question not underlying misinformation about what they are estimating

Of course, characteristics of specific groups may matter, but only at the margins. We should first account for the domain-general errors people make *anytime* they estimate a percentage, then examine group-specific explanations

The same is true of theories that people overestimate the size of groups that they have a lot of social contact with. Very little evidence of this!

We also test popular theories that people overestimate the size of groups they fear. Not the case. Again, misestimates result mainly from the psychological errors we make anytime we estimate %s, not from anything specific to the group being estimated

We argue that this pattern of over-under estimation arises from 🧠Bayesian reasoning under uncertainty🧠: people often have uncertain ideas in their minds about the size of these groups, but when they convert these ideas to percentages they ‘hedge’ their estimates toward a prior

And this is the same pattern of errors people make when estimating things like the percentage of dots on a page that are red 👇

Here’s the key figure: people make the same estimation errors regardless of what they are estimating---political and *entirely non-political* quantities. These are 100k estimates of the size of racial and non-racial groups made by 37k people in 22 countries

Instead, people are just really bad at estimating percentages They systematically overestimate smaller %s and underestimate larger %s, including ENTIRELY NON-POLITICAL %s, such as the % of the population that owns an Apple product, has a passport, or has indoor plumbing

We argue that journalists and academics are *wrong* when they interpret these misperceptions as evidence that the public is ignorant and misinformed 👇

New WP! The illusory truth effect (repetition -> belief) is core to psych of beliefs, & thought to be a deep bias impacting misinfo, persuasion & advertising Why would cognition include such a flaw? We argue it is a rational adaptation to high-quality info environments 🧵1/

I'm very happy to share that I'll be joining the Department of Political Science at @UNC Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor this fall. I'm excited for this next chapter and will always be incredibly grateful for my amazing experience at Stony Brook.

Interested in working with PRL as a postdoc next year? Apply by January 15! We offer the opportunity to collaborate on and lead projects related to democratic attitudes, elite behavior, and more!

This is a great postdoc opportunity! @seanjwestwood @ylelkes & Shanto Iyengar have a fantastic lab. Check out their work and apply for this postdoc: