AlexEnglish_Psych

@ThomasTalhelm Maybe it's the uptick in wind in winter that makes it more noticeable?🤔

Despite the term "wind city," I've heard so many people tell me Chicago isn't actually windy. "That just comes from the politics." Whether politics or not, Chicago is freakin' windy!

@blockbuster Credit to my hard-working co-authors! @liuqing_wei @AlexEngPsych 👏

The full text is available without a paywall. Have at it! nature.com/articles/s4159…

Fellow researchers: Use my data! 📢 The whole point of the journal Scientific Data is to validate and share datasets for other researchers to use. It's all available on the Open Science Framework: doi.org/10.17605/OSF.I…

And here's a taste of the types of analyses you can do with this data. Why are some places more collectivistic than others? If you know me, you guessed it--a history of rice farming! 🌾

But wait, is this just measuring economic development? After all, people need money to live on their own (and get divorced). It *is* correlated with GDP per capita, but not as strongly as people might think. It's just r = .04 in the latest province data! 😮

We also compared the collectivism index to the words people use on Weibo (China's Twitter). That comes from a recent study I did with researchers at @upenn. Good to see more converging evidence! ✅nature.com/articles/s4159… @upennnlp @sharathguntuku

Is it actually valid? Does it actually measure collectivism? We compared our new index to external markers like rates of visiting family for Chinese New Year and family ownership of companies. It checks out! ✅

The index uses statistics on divorce rates, the percentage of people living alone, and people living with extended family, following past research in other countries. experts.illinois.edu/en/publication…

You can rewind back to 1982. That means we can track change over time.

Here's the cool part: because it's Census data, you can rewind and fast forward.

...and 31 provinces.

We used Census data to estimate cultural differences in collectivism across 356 prefectures (like counties).

New study just out! 🚨 We created a way to rewind and fast forward through cultural differences in China. nature.com/articles/s4159… @NaturePortfolio

@ThomasTalhelm @SPSPnews Love that graph; would love to learn more about the findings!

How far can Thomas wander from the podium while he speaks? New personal record this morning at SPSP?? 😆 #SPSP2026 @SPSPnews

@ThomasTalhelm Well done! So nice to see how Smart Air is making a difference and really growing!!

That's why I founded Smart Air when I was living in China for a year as a grad student! Go, Smart Air!

@threadreaderapp Please unroll: x.com/ThomasTalhelm/…

In our thought style test, students categorized objects. Two belong to the same abstract category (train – bus). Two share a functional relationship (train – tracks).

Full text is available at @SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…