Cat Hicks

Psychologist for the humans of tech
Evidence strategy for technical teams

The Psychology of Software Teams (July, 2026): https://www.drcathicks.com/#book

Co-host at Change, Technically: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

Seizing the means of scientific production. "Too much psychology for a software engineering audience" - Reviewer 2

She/her
Founded: Catharsis Consulting, Developer Success Lab, Travrse
Neighborhood Cool Aunt of Science

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Last Notes

2026-07-17 18:24:58 GMT

You know what, if you are a FOSS bro angrily private messaging me multiple times to say you can't believe I haven't responded to your request for free labor within 24 hours of you leaving that request on social media, and besides that not being the relationship we have it's also during those specific 24 hours that I am on the phone trying to triage my loved one's adverse reaction to chemo, you have definitely succeeded at getting my attention and ensuring you will be remembered.

2026-05-25 21:24:39 GMT

A scientist who wrote software used across computational biology, and his thriving lab's destruction.
"his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," he recalls."
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding-cuts-nih-trump-administration

2026-05-07 15:15:55 GMT

"there is little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been impaired. This suggests that if we can shut down the distractions of our environment, it is possible to recover focus."
Inevitability and "ability decay" explanations essentially teach us learned helplessness about the things we experience, when really, we could change our environments. This is why I'm so against brain-based scare tactics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01407-w

2026-04-27 15:08:52 GMT

I have said and will continue to say most people have zero idea what it's like for scientists in the US right now.
We sat at an outdoor table the other day with a brilliant older queer scientist friend and ran into several scientist friends including one who worked at govt agencies on science funding. It is like having conversations after an apocalypse. So many people lost, labs folded, international postdocs gone, lines of work canned. DEI work going undercover, forbidden words erased

2026-03-30 17:21:07 GMT

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology)

2026-03-30 17:20:40 GMT

I feel mastodon could do with learning some ring theory, folks, I do not need a bunch of replies telling me that no one will ever value my wife's work ever again in any way and that we should just give up. What the fuck is the point of saying this to me besides cruelty. Will and have blocked.

2026-03-20 15:48:49 GMT

I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction

2026-03-20 02:56:58 GMT

We made a little free library and a neighborhood child submitted it to be a poke stop and now it is one
This whole situation is really escalating

2026-03-01 01:46:10 GMT

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Note that I'm not saying we SHOULD blame methods I think it's more helpful to center on decisions to use them, but if someone wrote something like Interviews of Mass Destruction I would eat that up

2026-03-01 01:37:55 GMT

You know what's funny to me is that qualitative methods ALSO kill people all the time (bad eyewitness interviews, horrible case reports re: foreign policy, arguably more bad qualitative stuff is being used in damaging ways than stats ever is) but we don't really see those as methods so we don't blame the methods like we do with stats.

2026-02-27 18:19:46 GMT

Here is a fun reason psychology is hard:
- making people more aware of stereotypes is usually REQUIRED on the way to intervene on them and reduce them
- but how we make people more aware of stereotypes can actually make them seem more common, and more socially shared, thereby making them stronger
Hardest science.

2026-02-10 18:40:16 GMT

Kind of feels like all the "claude coding burnout" I'm hearing about is showing that flow state is NOT all you need

2026-01-26 18:11:23 GMT

Rage sewed a new banner for our house highly recommend

2026-01-19 21:49:58 GMT

I'm honestly just a little bit mad I already turned my book in and cannot find a reason to squeeze this citation into it I love it so much
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01597-0

2025-12-31 18:40:09 GMT

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@nprofile…gua5 it is a more accurate term to use for a lot of the things I see people describe as cognitive load!

2025-12-31 18:30:18 GMT

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@nprofile…gua5 although if they make you start to doubt your ability to rely on colleagues' decision making in a cumulative way over time, we're back at allostatic load stress 😭

2025-12-31 18:28:39 GMT

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@nprofile…gua5 oh I see I see! I like these. Code Quality Loads maybe!

2025-12-31 18:01:00 GMT

Proposals for new types of "Cognitive Loads" for us to talk about in Software in 2026 because I'm tired of seeing the word Cognitive:

2025-12-26 17:05:20 GMT

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@nprofile…k72k oh my goodness, I can just imagine. So much solidarity with you on this. The nihilism in this type of negative groupthink means they genuinely cannot even evaluate what's in front of them when your work is about making strategic progress on human outcomes!! I have gotten similar comments that essentially boil down to, all human beings are evil, so I reject any aspect of psychological theory that allows for progress

2025-12-26 16:50:34 GMT

I've been thinking about this since I read it. I'm about to make this my entire personality
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29993325/

2025-12-16 17:09:28 GMT

Never do I feel more like an open source maintainer than when people tell me my research is bad because I didn't interact with them as promptly and cheerfully as they wanted on social media

2025-12-05 18:36:46 GMT

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@nprofile…vrd6 yeah I understand that completely. But on my side it's completely thankless to try to dig into it all and translate it all, too. Especially when most of the reactions are like fuck you for talking about methods, it's boring, stop being critical, give me an easy bullet point, etc etc. But then people also share tremendously baseless and essentially made up "replication failure" rates so be wary of those too. There's a lot of unjustified cynicism on top

2025-12-05 18:06:31 GMT

Sometimes people are like Cat do you know about fraudsters in social psychology. Friends there is no way you are more angry about these than I am. No way. I wasted two very precious years of my life trying to replicate what turned out to be a fraudulent line of research in grad school. I have never forgotten the betrayal of that and I never will.
I can love the good parts of psychology and criticize the bad parts just fine.

2025-10-26 16:56:04 GMT

Interesting having a post pop off very unexpectedly where you performed the ultimate fediverse criminal act of thinking about your own country in relation to some news lmfao

2025-10-25 20:44:15 GMT

I need to tamp down all these new followers and all this scientific content with some personal posts: I have had a two day migraine WHILE on book deadline and I am being really brave about it

2025-10-25 16:25:50 GMT

People popping up in my mentions to hand wave about science in China should probably know I did an entire dissertation that was a cross-cultural collaboration with Chinese psychologists and with populations in the US and China. Not a topic where I enjoy stereotypes. We (scientists who have collaborated internationally) understand the stakes are for all of humanity. The typical internationally collaborating scientist is brave & generous like you wouldn't believe. Especially after covid.

2025-10-25 14:34:14 GMT

This is just unreal
mRNA vaccines are going to be a turning point in human history if we're ever allowed to fucking do science again in this country
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09655-y

2025-10-10 20:55:00 GMT

Nothing is more energy vampire in online chatter to me than these people who ask me to explain some research thing and then freak the fuck out if I post a paper my God. Like be interested or don't sorry some things are complicated

2025-10-09 08:41:06 GMT

So I'm at this amazing interdisciplinary workshop on creativity and software engineering and struck by how much I know about designing actionable experiments and how unusual this expertise really is in software engineering. Sometimes the only way you get it is by getting really concrete and forcing yourself to examine how you would measure things you care about.
Thinking this might need to be the next dev science office hour: "design a study with Cat"

2025-10-08 21:14:53 GMT

Psychometrics and evidence science folks, I feel like we need to help software engineering out more because they are trying to measure constructs like depersonalization via software activity data?!?!!?
https://github.com/Rootly-AI-Labs/Rootly-burnout-detector

2025-09-07 20:37:18 GMT

This event on Empirical Security that I teased yesterday is now live for registration! 😎
I am hosting Dr. Ariana Mirian as we dive into the path to Empirical Security, why it's hard, why it's important. It's a zoom science office hour where YOU can ask questions too. I've long wanted to host this kind of open learning event and this is our inaugural experiment 🥰
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/empirical-security-now-with-dr-ariana-mirian-tickets-1670289674379

2025-09-03 15:00:59 GMT

I have studied how believing that software engineering is marked by "technical contests" exacerbates developers' experiences of threat and impostorism (inspired by and extending work by psychologists on "contest cultures" as a driver of field-specific ability beliefs).
Nevertheless somehow I am always Surprised Pikachu Face when it affects me directly, even though I LITERALLY HAVE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ABOUT HOW IT WORKS.

2025-08-23 22:21:11 GMT

I just think there's such an illusion of determinism in the software industry. As if all things are observed. As if any finding must generalize. As if (and I think this one is a profound one) all software developers are uniform and entirely fungible

2025-08-23 18:49:13 GMT

Reading yet another "we asked about 100 different things in the survey itself, and we're now going to report a focused story that we justify with statistical significance on 5 of them" large-scale tech industry report and wondering why an industry so aware of "hacking" isn't aware of "p-hacking"

2025-08-21 02:21:38 GMT

"art is dead" etc "no one is creating" etc "doomscrolling" etc I'm using my folk harp aural tradition training to jam with this sub-500k listeners female singer songwriter's TikTok snippets and having a great time so I don't know what YOU all are doing

2025-08-16 18:47:05 GMT

*baseball pitch windup*
What if
the "don't ever comment in code thing"
is mostly functioning as a strategic defense inside of a field with a climate that's so chilly that every disclosure of your thinking to anyone else just becomes a psychological attack vector
and people just have to come up with "it magically makes your code better to do this" explanations to justify it
*sprints away*

2025-08-16 16:39:10 GMT

Listen, understanding how to evaluate evidence claims on their OWN merits is a truly important skillset for staying safe in this era
https://gizmodo.com/mit-backs-away-from-paper-claiming-scientists-make-more-discoveries-with-ai-2000603790

2025-08-09 15:40:58 GMT

I just don't know what the change theory is from people who post a thousand times over that "managers are evil" and "the problem is managers"
ok
is the problem really the one woman who finally got to lead a tiny engineering team
or are there other factors we're thinking about

2025-08-07 16:01:21 GMT

imho, the machinery of myth-making is actually very easy to understand in this industry and it's not about burnout lol
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/988/302/842/396/667/original/73dafe75c7472e84.png

2025-08-03 19:12:14 GMT

ppl be screaming BUILD SOMETHING MAKE SOMETHING in my replies whenever I talk about programming and so ok, I made a small vertical tie that sits on a necklace and it matches trousers I also made
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/966/417/576/123/241/original/5c1eab8fbdc47168.jpg

2025-08-02 01:49:58 GMT

I've been hearing about a lot of behaviors that people think "melt their brain" or "make people stupid."
So what do people think "makes people smarter" and "repairs your brain"?

2025-07-31 17:15:38 GMT

Interesting shady bullshit when I see that multiple pieces I've written in the past when I was consulting as a scientist have been re-attributed to someone who didn't write them. Amazing. This is why I find it difficult to write for other people's platforms.

2025-07-31 17:11:22 GMT

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@nprofile…veyj Totally. I also think those people have a really egotistical bias about whether they truly are experts, lol.

2025-07-31 16:34:35 GMT

I have learned in the past 24 hours that many people in tech have no idea there is an entire social science around access to education & access to opportunity. You may not follow every half baked post I make but I'm saying nothing remotely controversial. Access is a thing with social features!!

2025-07-29 21:22:31 GMT

Gaslight of the century that we made programming totally inaccessible to huge portions of the population and now we're told that the reason is programming can only emerge from the innate genius of the brilliant few

2025-07-29 16:59:44 GMT

Here are some things that annoy the shit out of me when it comes to how we study/try to understand software teams, because I am trying to work on my book and I need to clear these out of my head and decide whether they're valuable or just complaints

2025-07-22 15:12:56 GMT

NEW Change, Technically just dropped where we go all in on Star Wars: Andor and the Psychology of Resistance ! 🤩
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17541876-andor-and-the-psychology-of-resistance
@nprofile…5u0p and I LOVED Andor, and I'm psyched to be sitting on a Comic-Con panel about it this very week -- if you're at Comic-Con you can catch our panel about Andor and Resistance on July 24th at noon and if not, you can dive deep into the psychology of dissenters and coalitions with this episode!

2025-07-21 21:55:32 GMT

Whenever I speak about how expensive it is for researchers to try to publish open access, I get astonished comments on here. Here is a lab that works on climate change related mortality (! Such critical work) breaking down how they can't afford it or even apply for federal funding for it anymore
https://bsky.app/profile/carlsonlab.bsky.social/post/3luixi7hwhc2p

2025-07-17 12:35:39 GMT

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@nprofile…6m2n when you think about what you want to measure here, do you want a measure of strength of self-efficacy? Or more like a skills inventory of things people know? (Or third option I'm not describing well enough)

2025-07-16 14:09:31 GMT

On this note, seriously though, how can I be more helpful? Because I've been feeling like I see many teams-that-support-other-teams struggling with surveys, or need guidance about survey design practices, would writing more about this be useful? Are there specific things you wonder about measuring on your teams??
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114863261876030501

2025-07-16 13:48:41 GMT

What is really frustrating to me about some qualitative research is not the qualitative methods, which I love, but the way that some of it gets jammed into trying to tell generalization and causality stories it can't possibly tell

2025-07-14 18:59:45 GMT

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@nprofile…6ezj very well I think! They got everybody a little rubber duck 😂

2025-07-14 18:50:32 GMT

Getting running texts from my wife who is teaching STEM teachers to teach programming right now is very uplifting 🥲

2025-07-12 20:21:58 GMT

This study includes ALL THE FIRST AND SECOND GRADERS ENROLLED IN SCHOOL IN FRANCE
"the gender gap increased with schooling rather than with age. These findings point to the first year of school as the time and place where a maths gender gap emerges in favour of boys"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09126-4

2025-07-11 22:39:20 GMT

I'm finally reading this paper but my first thought is anybody on earth good at predicting how long a task will take them....?
Setting aside the small person sample, randomizing the tasks within developer is....super odd? Wouldn't we start to expect a lot of order effects?
https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf

2025-07-09 21:04:45 GMT

It took a thousand years longer than I wanted it to, thanks Health(tm), but I'm really happy with this chapter of my book on the psychology of performance and motivation
This topic is so important to me, quite literally the very first one that drew me to getting a PhD in psych in the first place

2025-07-09 15:20:50 GMT

"I live in this world [of proving that my work has value]…just look at the world right now. We’re asking 'what is the ROI of science, does your stuff connect to money?' The funniest thing for me is my stuff connects to money all the time….But you have to make it legible to people, you have to give them a vocabulary. One of the key things is you have to show the cost of not doing the improvement." - yours truly, speaking on showing the value of being a change-maker
https://www.youtube.com/live/Vwc5M2cDb5E?si=dJovl2XcKLHQnN05

2025-07-07 23:14:36 GMT

Yesterday we saw someone we love. She has Alzheimer's.
This is why they can demonize science and scientists as much as they fucking want and we won't stop caring about science and fighting for science to exist, and continue, and serve all of us, and to protect the scientists who can give us breakthroughs.
It is the only thing that has ever given us more time with the people we love.

2025-07-02 15:05:44 GMT

Casual thoughts about memory and our misconceptions about it, based on the last few weeks of seeing a LOT of lay mental models about memory and cognition:
- it is well known in the psychological and cognitive sciences that memory is not like a man-made recording device. Your memory is not a tape recorder, or analogous to computer memory. Nevertheless people will insist on constantly using computer metaphors for memory. Just know this is widely regarded as inaccurate

2025-06-30 16:51:25 GMT

I find it hilarious that this post popped off
I guess we're all tired of the "spatial ability" hand waving (spatial ability is neither well defined nor well measured nor cleanly predictively associated with things like 'being able to do software')
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114762915691826859

2025-06-30 15:14:45 GMT

"By the way, I avoided doing a software metrics project for a long time."
"Our point in this project wasn't really to say, we know everything about cycle time....it was actually to say, we know a lot of places are using this measure, let's take a hardcore look as scientists at what this measure is telling us"
I'm proud of this interview, where I open up about the motivation behind empowering the DSL to dive into cycle time for one of our last open science projects
https://youtu.be/e5PxPBGj64o?si=EBwztVco_Tuzm5NY

2025-06-29 16:37:58 GMT

I guess for me if your model for improving "developer experience" does not take seriously the social constructs around human ability that will forever limit who we let into "software" if we don't face them, well, I can't take your model seriously. It won't solve problems it'll just move them

2025-06-29 14:36:26 GMT

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The other day someone online said me talking about my book was equivalent to being a grotesquely grifting salesperson! HOW DO YOU THINK PEOPLE SHOULD SHARE THEIR WORK should it just spontaneously emerge from the ether my God you don't think you're in an information ecosystem with systemic weights in it whether or not there's a social media feed involved?? How do you think things get passed on! With systemic judgments and biases from other humans!

2025-06-29 14:30:05 GMT

People will share a thousand takes about AI and writing but when you write a long piece people tend not to share it. People will go on and on about bad science but when you laboriously research something with cites and lit reviewing you KNOW people won't read or share it. I'm not saying things are hopeless I'm just saying we are in an attention economy and if you are too good to try to use your energy to support things you say you care about how do you think it's going to work?

2025-06-28 01:47:37 GMT

Well study authors finally admit they have no stance on whether measuring more or less "brain activity" within the context of their task measurement is good or bad despite previous quotes about brain health. Lol.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02005-y

2025-06-27 18:42:34 GMT

*brain hit by a bolt of lightning*
are software engineering teams often engaging in epistemic injustice with the rest of us

2025-06-27 18:19:39 GMT

It's weird to have actual magic that actually works and realize the problem is that people are so used to bullshit they assume your thing is also bullshit

2025-06-27 16:23:46 GMT

Let's talk about open science, doing research projects that serve developers, and money
that's right
🙀 MONEY 🙀
Right up top I am going to tell you: this is a "capitalism is bad"-free thread. You know, I know, we all know. Please do not reply with "capitalism is bad"

2025-06-27 15:49:29 GMT

Since being a scientist on a comic-con panel means I get a comic-con pass.....that justifies spending a comic-con pass' worth on comic-con cosplay, wouldn't you say??

2025-06-24 23:09:57 GMT

Are our brains in danger of "47% connectivity collapse"?!
Does that viral MIT chatgpt study REALLY say what we're copy-pasting about it?
@nprofile…5u0p a neurobiology professor & neuroscience PhD, digs into the brain
(I am also there)
Listen now and give us a boost! Better brain research for all.
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-you-deserve-better-brain-research
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/740/846/213/032/542/original/c0e7ce232ce63e13.mp4

2025-06-23 20:57:55 GMT

TOMORROW, June 24th I will be participating in a PlatformCon panel with some amazing people that is free to join and watch live!
"Driving incremental, meaningful, measurable change to developer experience" 🥰
https://platformcon.com/sessions/driving-incremental-meaningful-measurable-change-to-developer-experience

2025-06-20 20:21:31 GMT

Holy fucking shit I have just spent fifteen minutes reading social media reactions to that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper and absolutely no one understands brains or has read this paper

2025-06-20 16:31:20 GMT

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@nprofile…q5wq their participation is such a gift to humanity!

2025-06-20 16:16:23 GMT

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I'm going to say yet another controversial thing about this paper though, and that's to propose that despite the good intention of a lot of criticism that calls out the sample size, sample size is really quite different for a lot of neuro stuff, like there is a LOT of value to "small N" research in this world, that doesn't necessarily make a project bad by itself
I mean it's certainly a consideration re: claims. But it depends on the claims being made and small N studies are often v valuable

2025-06-19 21:33:15 GMT

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If achieving the OUTCOMES your edtech promises requires a small child to sit quietly without social engagement for a solid hour of their life, you know you are working with an edtech team that does not care enough about the real world of classrooms to ask: what are small children like, what are they experiencing

2025-06-19 21:32:10 GMT

What is the first thing that the learning science researchers ask when the enthusiastic software developers show us a bright shiny math app they want to deploy in a classroom
"how will using this make a child FEEL?"
Why? Because this is the precondition for everything. And I mean that on a visceral, human level. You build for kids, you ask: how long are you asking a small child to sit in a seat? Look at a screen? Touch and move screen objects with their fingers?
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114712045217208620

2025-06-19 18:04:58 GMT

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I've convinced my wife to dive into this and no promises but we'll see if we come up with a good conversation. This might be my biggest accomplishment on behalf of y'all this month because she does NOT take time away from teaching about neuroscience to do BONUS teaching about neuroscience lightly.... Feel free to leave me questions here about this paper that you'd like me + Ashley to weigh in on from the pov of learning science and neuroscience

2025-06-19 15:59:50 GMT

Sigh. I'm still so bothered by that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper BECAUSE it correctly positions some of the compelling questions we have about LLM usage but then does us all a disservice in its approach, pushy interpretation, and inappropriate or misleading framing of brain evidence and measurement of human problem-solving, imo
I am asking myself: what studies would *I* design to evaluate people's usage of LLMs in keeping with learning science and without neurohype?

2025-06-18 20:43:04 GMT

Feels like it's socially relevant information that every guy I knew in CS/HCI who was an unrepentant grifter dude making extreme unevidenced claims about human cognition ten years ago is flourishing in an AI position now and has "AI expert" all over their socials. Every. Single. One. Meanwhile every single woman I worked with back then is in like a laborious, rigor-intensive, multidisciplinary research role
God I wish I had our salary data

2025-06-18 16:58:47 GMT

"consider a hypothetical early intervention program targeting elementary school children’s beliefs about math success.
Such an intervention might use engaging stories and activities that would allow children and parents to explore together different “recipes for success” in mathematics that don’t rely on brilliance."
- Bauer, C. A., Poddar, A., Brummelman, E., & Cimpian, A. (2025). The Brilliance–Belonging Model: How Cultural Beliefs About Intellectual Ability Undermine Educational Equity.

2025-06-16 16:04:28 GMT

In general I think we should be very cautious about sweeping claims about human intelligence and impairment of cognition. From "cellphones make you stupid" to "LLMs make you stupid", from "coding makes you a genius" to "knowing math makes you a genius." Pushing for absolutisms about human intelligence and human cognition is a toxic pattern that is also so baked into our history and cultural patterns and it plays right into dehumanization for either extreme

2025-06-16 03:42:52 GMT

I.... This is one of the weirder papers I've ever looked at
https://fediscience.org/@gwagner/114690366530883451

2025-06-13 16:07:24 GMT

"A psychology of decision making requires a psychology of action grounded in enabling and sustaining efficacy beliefs. One must add a performatory self to the decisional self, otherwise the decider is left stranded in thought"
- Bandura, A. (2023). Cultivate self‐efficacy for personal and organizational effectiveness. Principles of Organizational Behavior: The Handbook of Evidence‐Based Management 3rd Edition, 113-135.

2025-06-12 22:15:53 GMT

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Some needle to thread here between "nothing you say will ever work for me because we're too special" and "everything must generalize regardless of context", both of which are closed minded stances in the end

2025-06-12 22:14:51 GMT

Fascinating conversation with a chaplain today about rituals that made me think how we want every "ritual" in software to generalize and become a rule for everybody but maybe it's not only ok but ideal to have localized rituals that emerge in dialogue with a place

2025-06-11 17:53:05 GMT

Fucking EXCUSE me?
This is an email I just got from nsf.gov because I am a scientific advisor -- OUTSIDE of a university -- for a specific NSF grant. And they want MY demographics??
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/666/001/758/397/676/original/9d09fb050423b3c3.png

2025-06-06 12:09:57 GMT

Can't believe I get to actually be on an Andor panel at comic-con talking about the psychology of courage under authoritarianism. What is life.
https://mastodon.social/@gl33p/114631921504421038

2025-06-03 07:14:52 GMT

So here is an interesting pattern I've started to see across my consulting conversations: if you have an infrastructure team building for internal users (eg, developers using your team's choices and tools), does infra have support and a process for doing research on those users' needs??
Because it appears to me we have built "DevEx" without much inclusion of the diagnosis part of the UX analogy
What is current state for those users? What are their pain points? What is easiest to solve?

2025-06-02 13:41:35 GMT

I want to be crystal clear about something. The people I love most in the world are being directly attacked, threatened and having their scientific careers destroyed, and if I have the internal bandwidth to share about the experience on here I expect conversation, not lecturing. I'm not interested in a fraction of mastodon reply whining in my replies when I'm talking about science in 2025, not while my wife has to think about her physical safety because she dares lead diversity in STEM programs

2025-06-02 11:04:24 GMT

"scientists who are willing and able to do so will have to enter the public arena"
I would venture to say as well that keepers of public arenas should be inviting and platforming scientists...you will lose what you don't fight for
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02240-3

2025-06-01 08:28:15 GMT

An extra special Cat Talks announcement: I'm going to be at Comic-Con to join a panel exploring the latest season of ANDOR: "From Resistance to Rebellion." I'll be repping as a psychological scientist sharing about the psychology of coalitions, the psychology of conformity, and the psychology of courage under authoritarianism!!!!!!!!
Details to follow closer to. But yes, this IS the most Dr. Cat event imaginable 😎

2025-05-24 21:31:12 GMT

So that top bar is my wife and all of my closest friends
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/564/934/474/414/895/original/f0ac1eacebd95bdd.png

2025-05-24 20:57:23 GMT

This made me so effing emotional. When our bonds as people working together are at one and the same time the most real thing we have and yet so tenuous that it's frightening to just take a picture together
https://www.science.org/content/article/photo-subversive-nsf-staff-overcome-obstacles-75th-anniversary-portrait

2025-05-24 15:43:46 GMT

"Oh, did you use AI to get those cute illustrations for your talk?"
"No, I actually use AJ" (my wife @nprofile…5u0p who graciously dashes off whatever ridiculous illustration I demand)

2025-05-23 15:15:25 GMT

Why is there all this emphasis on how developers need to be locked into delivering value for the customer and no formalization of "feedback from customers" in all these "developer experience metrics"

2025-05-23 00:03:01 GMT

The only recommendation engine I trust is the independent Canadian fabric store I buy from that keeps me in an infinite loop because I see a pretty fabric --> they suggest new patterns to go with it --> I buy new patterns --> I need more fabric --> I will never escape this but I'm ok with it

2025-05-22 20:56:17 GMT

Measuring "PRs per dev" (presumably conditioned on the same unit of time even though what that rate is is very unclear to me whenever this measure is proposed) is really giving "number of patients per doctor's day" I can't be the only person who feels this way

2025-05-22 15:26:28 GMT

As a person who struggled to breath for months after covid I am truly terrified about the immediate danger of this era. The kind of dehumanization I experienced around the politicization of covid is part of a long, long human history of ableism. Even scientist friends constantly denied my experience

2025-05-21 18:10:46 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…8wcz I've read about half of it! I actually enjoyed some parts but it's definitely dated

2025-05-21 14:51:39 GMT

I have been looking at research in software engineering about "motivation." I find it disappointing. It's not uncommon for work to state (without evidence) that software engineers are noticeably distinct from the general population in how their motivation functions. Why would this be true? On what grounds? It may be distinct in the way that every occupation and professional endeavor creates specific PRACTICES for it to be exercised, but the argument that core *psychology itself* differs?!