# All articles

> Every Mitwa Lab review and essay, grouped by track.

## Psychology

- [Memory as reconstruction, how people misremember their own lives](../misremembering/index.md) (Review): A famous false-memory study, its critics and its 2023 replication, set beside evidence that freely recalled details of two staged real events were mostly correct.
- [What it means to feel heard, and how researchers measure it](../feeling-heard/index.md) (Review): Perceived responsiveness is usually split into being understood, validated and cared for; this review asks how each part is measured and what the better studies show.
- [The family you grew up in and the relationships you have now](../family-of-origin/index.md) (Review): Five common beliefs about how the family of origin shapes adult relationships, each checked against prospective, adoption, twin and large panel studies.
- [Loneliness as a health risk, and what the smoking comparison rests on](../loneliness-and-health/index.md) (Review): Where the comparison between poor social ties and smoking came from, and what happens to the risk of loneliness once health and circumstances are counted.
- [Trauma and thinking, what recovery does and does not restore](../trauma-and-thinking/index.md) (Review): Twin, birth-cohort and treatment studies on whether trauma causes the cognitive difficulties seen in PTSD, and whether they lift when symptoms do.
- [Writing about feelings, and what is left of the effect](../expressive-writing/index.md) (Review): Estimates of the health benefit of writing about upsetting events run from a medium effect in 1998 to a very small one later, which some analyses cannot tell from zero.
- [The gap between intending and doing, and what happens to fixes at scale](../intention-action-gap/index.md) (Review): This review follows the gap between intending and doing, and the remedies offered for it, from single experiments to a gym megastudy to government trials reaching millions.

## Computer science

- [Why language models make things up](../why-language-models-make-things-up/index.md) (Review): Why a system trained to predict text states false things fluently, what the main explanations rest on, and what has been shown to reduce it.
- [What a test of a given size can prove](../what-a-test-can-prove/index.md) (Essay): One benchmark of 500 questions, followed through the arithmetic: how precise a single score is, and how small a gap between two systems it can detect.
- [When a model should say it does not know](../when-to-say-i-dont-know/index.md) (Review): What it takes for a system to decline a question it cannot answer, what decides whether it ever does, and what declining costs.
- [Model judges and their biases](../model-judges/index.md) (Review): When one language model grades another, how far the grade can be trusted, which distortions have been measured, and what statistics can and cannot repair.
- [Why a model tells you what you want to hear](../sycophancy/index.md) (Review): What sycophancy in a language model is, what the literature says causes it, and why the 2025 GPT-4o update passed the tests run before its release.
- [Human raters and what sways them](../human-ratings/index.md) (Review): What published studies show about human ratings of model output: what raters respond to, why studies resist comparison, and where a large public vote is disputed.
- [When the test is already in the training data](../benchmark-contamination/index.md) (Review): How researchers learned to measure how much of a benchmark score comes from a model having seen the test, and where the evidence still disagrees.

## On-device AI

- [What a reply costs in joules, and where the heat goes](../joules-per-reply/index.md) (Review): Published measurements of the energy a phone spends generating text, worked through in joules, and what the phone does when that energy turns to heat.
- [What eight gigabytes has to hold, counted in bytes](../eight-gigabytes/index.md) (Review): A phone's memory budget for a language model, worked through in bytes from Apple's documentation and published models, with the unknown lines left visibly blank.
- [Why a smaller model writes faster, from the memory chip upward](../why-smaller-models-are-faster/index.md) (Review): Text generation on a phone is paced mostly by memory traffic, so smaller weights usually mean faster replies. Published measurements show where that proportional rule bends.
- [What a small language model cannot do, belief by belief](../what-a-small-model-cannot-do/index.md) (Review): Six common beliefs about small language models, each checked against published measurements and given a verdict: supported, partly supported, not supported or not measured.
- [Learning without collecting the data, a timeline from 2016 to 2025](../learning-without-collecting/index.md) (Review): A review of methods from 2016 to 2025 for learning from phones without gathering their text, what each still sends, and what outsiders found where they tested it.

## Companions and society

- [Does more time with a companion help or harm?](../engagement-and-wellbeing/index.md) (Review): Experiments find lower self-reported loneliness straight after a chat with a companion, no evidence that this lasts beyond the session, and worse outcomes among heavier users, with cause unresolved.
- [How many people use AI for company, and how we know](../how-many-use-companions/index.md) (Review): Published figures for companionship use of AI run from under 1% to 72%. Read with what each one counts, nearly all of them fit together.
- [Dependence on a companion, and what the word measures](../dependence/index.md) (Review): Five common beliefs about dependence on AI companions, each checked against the trials, panels, surveys and forum studies that measure it.
- [Testing whether a conversation is safe, one evaluation taken apart](../evaluating-psychological-safety/index.md) (Review): How researchers test whether a chatbot responds safely to a person in distress, read through one validation study, and what a passed test can show.
- [Where a companion stops and a therapist starts](../companion-or-therapist/index.md) (Essay): Lawmakers and professional bodies mostly separate a companion from therapy by what a product is offered as or built to be. Five hard cases show where that holds.