Who owns guns in America today, and why? We argue White Southerns responded to the emancipation of Black Southerners by buying firearms, and this culture continues: slavery in 1860 predicts today's gun ownership in the US South. Now out at @PNASNexus :

RT @PaulaNiedenthal: @UWPsych @UWMadison is hiring 2 social psychologists, one TT (deadline 9/15/24) and one tenured, open rank (deadline 1….

Come join us, and I'll take you sailing!! (Plus do some very cool science with very cool colleagues in a very cool department).

RT @ErinWestgate: Are political conservatives better off? It depends how you define it: while conservatives tend to report happier and more….

RT @TrendsCognSci: Our March issue is online! Why birds are smart, vagal signals and goal-directed behavior (@glassybrain @cornu_copiae), w….

RT @mohebial: Gotta read it carefully, but I love the idea proposed here. Decent.

You can read the whole thing here: 10/10.

Understanding how given groups are represented in the broader culture is still interesting of course, but it is not necessarily the same as understanding ground-truth differences in how groups understand the world themselves. 9/10

4) How do we know? LLMs are most powerful in studying hard-to-survey cultural groups or those with little prior data, but this is also where it can be hardest to know if the LLM is faithfully representing the beliefs of a set of people versus stereotypes on the internet. 8/n.

3) LLMs “know” cultural psychology. They may be learning from the cultural psychology literature itself and then repeating back to us things that psychologists have already discovered (in other words, the extant scientific literature could be influencing model output) 7/n.

2) Whose writing??? Being written ABOUT is not the same as doing the writing. LLMsmay overrepresent stereotypes, especially where outgroup writings are more voluminous than writings from inside the group. 6/n.

1) The internet is not the world. What info makes it onto the internet is shaped by many forces, such as literacy, power, and the rewards that come with posting. Bias in, bias out. 5/n.

HOWEVER. LLMs are biased. 4/n

LLMs can reproduce cultural differences: although WEIRD by default, they can be asked to respond ‘as if’ they were a person with certain properties (age, politics, etc). And their answers are remarkably accurate. 3/n.

Cultural psychologists have used compressed cultural artifacts (like Google Book’s nGram) to track cultural change over time. For instance, US culture shifted in viewing happiness as “luck” (in the 1800s) to more modern views. LLMs could let us do the same on a massive scale. 2/n.

What can ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) tell us about people? As a collection of compressed cultural artifacts, LLMs potentially allow for the study of culture at a massive scale. But caution is needed. 1/n 🧵 . Now out at TiCS

RT @PaulaNiedenthal: Come work with my amazing colleague! @SPSPnews @SASstudents.

RT @NickButtrick: With #SESP wrapping up, it’s a good time to say I’m hoping to recruit a grad student (or 2!) this year! If you’re interes….

With #SESP wrapping up, it’s a good time to say I’m hoping to recruit a grad student (or 2!) this year! If you’re interested in guns, culture, or novels/reading, please reach out - I’d love to hear from you and chat about Madison. (Pls share!)

RT @ErinWestgate: “What is it about fiction, about poetry, about narrative that makes it so powerful? …that makes philosophers think of mas….

RT @ErinWestgate: Does what we read shape our worldviews? People who read more literary fiction growing up exhibit more complex worldviews….