Professor @TilburgU School of Economics and Management. Computational linguistics, text-as-data, and Python (@ThePSF) enthusiast. ZEPH 3 17
Stephan Hollander
cc @emollick.bsky.social
📣 New paper @nathumbehav.nature.com: A reporting checklist for large language models in behavioural science
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨Our paper is out in PNAS: we found classic human persuasion techniques worked on AIs in a "parahuman" way, making them agree to objectionable requests (increasing compliance from 35% to 51%)
It worked on a range of major recent LLMs though newer models do resist more www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Computational approaches to media narrative analysis either miss nuanced storytelling patterns through coarse-grained analysis, or require domain-specific taxonomies that limit scalability.
We show joint event and character modeling can address this gap. Details in our #ACL2026 (Main) paper.
🧵1/10
“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/
Interesting new paper on AI coding tools and productivity on GitHub. Large gains at the code-writing stage are partly offset by downstream human bottlenecks in code review and deployment.
Link: www.nber.org/papers/w35275
Cross-posting this from Twitter, because I like it:
(by @littmath.bsky.social)
Conference organizers called the cops on attendees for distributing an op-ed (published in a medical journal) that was critical of the Trump administration's health policy. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...
You may have seen this graph in the FT, which claims to show birth rates plunging since the introduction to smartphone. Except it doesn't.
Read my short piece with @debscohen.bsky.social on some of the problems with this graph of juicy cherries!
unherd.com/newsroom/are...
Short story about statistical modeling without causal inference gone badly wrong.
Just head on the news that preschoolers play 15 minutes less on rainy days. The reporting stressed that the research was "associational" and therefore couldn't tell us why.
Huh? 1/
