Ben Tappin
• Assistant professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
• Persuasion, technology, experiments
• benmtappin.com
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin🚨New WP "@Grok is this true?" We analyze 1.6M factcheck requests on X (grok & Perplexity) 📌Usage is polarized, Grok users more likely to be Reps 📌BUT Rep posts rated as false more often—even by Grok 📌Bot agreement with factchecks is OK but not great; APIs match fact-checkers osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Ben TappinMy Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd
- Reposted by Ben Tappin📢 JOB ALERT! Postdoc opportunity in Political Behaviour & Political Economy (UKRI‑funded) - Please do share with anyone who might be a great fit. If you’re interested or would like to know more, please feel free to get in touch!! jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin
🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost! - I land somewhere between this and the OP. Evaluating the quality of the methods often requires fully understanding the research question and estimand. And that usually requires reading the intro. (Disclaimer: but even then it’s no guarantee😭 cf. www.the100.ci/2024/08/27/l... @dingdingpeng.the100.ci)
- My students are in for a treat next week
- Reposted by Ben TappinA very interesting data-rich analysis of persuasion on digital media by @benmtappin.bsky.social. Recommend! open.substack.com/pub/benmtapp...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate
- Reposted by Ben Tappin🚨 New working paper 🚨 We often see populist parties like Reform UK blame higher energy bills on climate change policies. What are the political consequences of this strategy? Very early draft; comments and criticisms are welcomed! full draft: z-dickson.github.io/assets/dicks...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts." Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson! Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...
- Insightful long-read: "With AGI [artificial general intelligence], powerful actors will lose their incentive to invest in regular people–just as resource-rich states today neglect their citizens because their wealth comes from natural resources rather than taxing human labor." intelligence-curse.ai
- Reposted by Ben Tappin🗞️ 🤖 Weekend reading anyone? For the launch of @transformernews.ai as a standalone publication, they invited me to contribute a piece on what persuasive AI might mean for democracy and elections. Here’s the result… buff.ly/OJsNmpK
- Reposted by Ben TappinWE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you. Apply by: 10 Oct www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- A great post, this point especially: "I don’t mean to argue all research needs to be slow and fully documented. When we are just starting in a new area, it’s chaos. But at some point, by the time results are reported, the workflow needs to be professionalized. Research is not a hobby. It’s a job."
- How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinExciting new research by @benmtappin.bsky.social and colleagues ⬇️
- Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19 LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more! 🧵:
- 👇New experiments in which we aimed to map the levers and scope of political persuasion with conversational AI models. It was a tremendous privilege to lead on this work alongside the brilliant @kobihackenburg.bsky.social. The paper is packed with results and we'd love your comments!
- Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19 LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more! 🧵:
- Have now read this paper in detail. It’s a tour de force. If you’re interested in the potential impact of AI on election outcomes you should put it by your bedside. Key takeaway: let’s remain alive to, but healthily skeptical of, the possibility of large impacts: knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...
- Reposted by Ben TappinNew paper in PSPB! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Well, actually, not "new". We first put this paper online way back Dec 2022... in any case, we think it's really cool! We find that conspiracy believers tend to be overconfident & really don't seem to realize that most disagree with them
- Reposted by Ben TappinNew Substack post It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...
- Reposted by Ben TappinI think the current state of social science research is pretty bad and I wrote something for @asteriskmag.bsky.social about it. asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca...
- Reposted by Ben TappinSome snapshots from our event on Friday, where we discussed the future of polling, the challenges ahead, and how AI is shaping survey research. Massive THANK YOU to all panelists for sharing their wisdom with us! Here’s a thread with some key take-aways:
- Reposted by Ben TappinThanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>
- Does anybody have a good visualization to explain how interactions can be confounded, and why interactions require interaction controls? @urisohn.bsky.social maybe? (Asking because I have an idea, but want to check out what exists already before investing the effort)
- Reposted by Ben Tappin🚨New R package! {easymediation}🚨 The *Simplest* and *Most Correct* Way to Do Causal Mediation Analysis Are you tired of explaining mediation analysis to your colleagues? Just send them this package. github.com/rpsychologis...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- It’s high time we started asking the important questions
- Interesting 👇
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinNew visualization tool alert! The vayr package version 1.0.0 is now on CRAN. It contains position adjustments for ggplot2 that help with overplotting in pleasing ways. My favorite is position_sunflower(). - install.packages("vayr") - alexandercoppock.com/vayr #rstats #ggplot2 #dataviz
- BlueSky's stats meme game remains healthy
- What a line "we argue that our evidence is consistent with finding that badass TikTok edits are approximately as effective as professionally produced television ads" doi.org/10.1177/2056...
- “I am the last person to tell people what they should be interested in—but the first one to tell them that if they don’t tell me what they are trying to estimate in the first place, why even bother.” 🤙
- Thank god at least SOME firms out there are asking the important questions about political differences
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinProudly presenting the (for now) final version of "Why experiments work." To share the materials in a slightly more professional manner, I added a "Resources" page to my website: juliarohrer.com/resources/. That was long overdue anyway; now there's also a curated list of my papers and blog posts.
- 10/10 would show in class
- Background beats for coding this AM. Motivated but TENSE writing this data cleaning script www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0d8...
- Reposted by Ben TappinNew paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 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)?🧵👇
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Timeline cleanse, courtesy @rmcelreath.bsky.social
- This is well worth your time 🤌 worksinprogress.co/issue/the-pr...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin📄NEW PAPER📄 Ever wondered content people actually pay *attention* to online? Our new research reveals that you likely pay attention to far more varied political content than your likes and shares suggest
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinDid you know that all the fine artisanal memes from my stats lectures are available in the course repo? Reuse and remixing freely encouraged github.com/rmcelreath/s...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinWant to make nice graphs with me, starting this summer? I am hiring for two PhD positions at the University of Witten/Herdecke.
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- The true culture war issue 🫖
- For people interested in politically motivated cognition, this thread may interest (bonus: Olaf is an academic-rockstar-to-be!) 👇
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin📈Out today in @PNASNews!📈 In a large pre-registered experiment (n=25,982), we find evidence that scaling the size of LLMs yields sharply diminishing persuasive returns for static political messages. 🧵:
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Also how I accept “suggested improvements to the manuscript” from R2
- Reposted by Ben TappinSay you’ve got very good causal IDENTIFICATION. Can you say you have causality, can make a causal general claim, and can say what “THE causal effect” is? NO We explain why in new article at Journal of Causal Inference. www.degruyter.com/document/doi...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinOut in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social Can people tell true from false news? Yes! Our meta-analysis shows that people rate true news as more accurate than false news (d = 1.12) and were better at spotting false news than at recognizing true news (d = 0.32). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Ben Tappin[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ben TappinOh yes, Homer’s famous “Tes Thdpssssps.” 👍🏻
- Reposted by Ben TappinLast year, we published a paper showing that AI models can "debunk" conspiracy theories via personalized conversations. That paper raised a major question: WHY are the human<>AI convos so effective? In a new working paper, we have some answers. TLDR: facts osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Looking forward to poisoning some more minds tomorrow! 🚀
- Reposted by Ben TappinNew blog post! Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly. So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost. www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...
