Reasonable People

Listening to Tommy Robinson

What did I learn by giving the right-wing activist my ears for 90 minutes?

Nov 9 • 

Tom Stafford

14

19

6

Helping people spot misinformation

And the greatest gift psychology gave the world

Nov 1 • 

Tom Stafford

13

2

2

October 2025

The Ideological Turing Test

Do you truly understand those you disagree with?

Oct 18 • 

Tom Stafford

42

21

9

Community Notes require a Community

How we used a novel analysis to understand what causes people to quit the widely adopted content-moderation system

Oct 11 • 

Tom Stafford

11

2

2

When half the population don't trust

Reasonable People #77: A Brexit-era survey of who voters trust and what it means for our information environment

Oct 4 • 

Tom Stafford

17

4

September 2025

The costs of being open-minded

Reasonable People #76: You probably think open-mindedness is a virtue. Be careful. Others may be willing to punish you for it.

Sep 27 • 

Tom Stafford

15

1

3

The intelligence is in the user

Continuing my series on hooks for thinking about the new AI

Sep 20 • 

Tom Stafford

10

2

3

Distributed Peer Review

A new method for evaluating research project proposals shows us how much we don't know about collective decision making.

Sep 13 • 

Tom Stafford

5

1

1

How to outsmart a crowd of 5000 people in 4 minutes

An ingenious experiment shows the secret sauce need to improve on the wisdom of crowds

Sep 5 • 

Tom Stafford

71

17

19

Some personal news

Change is afoot at Reasonable People HQ

Sep 3 • 

Tom Stafford

21

4

4

August 2025

Decoy effects in the purchase of 3,649,027 bottles of wine

Cognitive bias and big data in a new paper from Devine et al 2025

Aug 30 • 

Tom Stafford

9

3

2

Algorithmically-enhanced consensus seeking

A hard test of whether we can use technology to enhance dialogue across conflict lines

Aug 26 • 

Tom Stafford

6

2

1