Our article "Complex Contagion in Social Networks: Causal Evidence from a Country-Scale Field Experiment” published in Sociological Science won the James Coleman Best Paper Award sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12... @davidlazer.bsky.social and Jaemin Lee

Complex Contagion in Social Networks: Causal Evidence from a Country-Scale Field Experiment

Article: Complex Contagion in Social Networks: Causal Evidence from a Country-Scale Field Experiment | Sociological Science | Posted October 16, 2025

sociologicalscience.com

Cognitive Spillover in Human-AI Teams ACM TOCHI dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

save the date: CI'26 September 27-30 near DC ci.acm.org/2026/

Think AI only affects the person using it? Our experiments show AI reshapes shared language, collective attention, mental models, AND social cohesion among human teammates. AI reshapes the cognitive ecology of teamwork dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... @acmtochi.bsky.social

Agents of Chaos www.science.org/content/arti...

AI algorithms can become ‘agents of chaos’

Given autonomous control of other software, programs shared private medical details and deleted files without permission

science.org

Agents of Chaos -- what are autonomous OpenClaw agents up to? How do they interact with each other? Read our investigation of OpenClaw at researchgate.net/publication/... And an interactive website agentsofchaos.baulab.info @davidbau.bsky.social @natalieshapira.bsky.social @openclaw-x.bsky.social

Our research report on red-teaming stateful OpenClaw agents in the BauLab is finally out! 🥳 This awesome effort was led by @natalieshapira.bsky.social and involved 6 ClawBots and 20 researchers from various institutions. Check it out ➡️ agentsofchaos.baulab.info

@veredshwartz.bsky.social @tamarott.bsky.social @criedl.bsky.social @reuth-mirsky.bsky.social @maartensap.bsky.social @davidmanheim.alter.org.il @tomerullman.bsky.social @davidbau.bsky.social

LLMs read your mind how much validation you want ... and then adjust sycophancy accordingly. Overall: Personalization makes sycophancy worse and LLMs abandon their stance more often osf.io/preprints/ps...

How does behavior spread? Interactions beyond pairwise ties really do matter empirically, but that doesn't mean behavior spreads better on clustered networks. Two complementary studies paint picture of complex contagions sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our lab is looking to fill a post-doc position to do research on human-AI interaction. More details here www.christophriedl.net/jobs.html

How does behavior spread? Do interactions beyond pairwise ties matter? We build on hypergraphs to explore higher-order social influence and study a country-scale randomized experiment

How does behavior spread? New insights on complex contagion in social networks with causal evidence from a country-scale field experiment @davidlazer.bsky.social sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

When are multi-agent LLM systems merely a collection of individual agents versus an integrated collective with higher-order structure? New paper shows multi-agent LLM systems have capacity for emergent coordination and how to steer them ...

📌 Save the Date! The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲. Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science. Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com

Some important findings in this paper: 1) Working with AI boosts the performance of people solving math, science & ethics questions 2) The biggest boost is for the hardest problems 3) High performers remain highest performing, but low performers gain more 4) People who are good with AI gain most

Who benefits from AI and on which task? And how can we measure human-AI synergy?

Rivalry can backfire! We study the role of peer effects on top of known economic effects like competition pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Very pleased our paper looking at the diffusion of complex contagions is out in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Diffusion of complex contagions is shaped by a trade-off between reach and reinforcement | PNAS

How does social network structure amplify or stifle behavior diffusion? Existing theory suggests that when social reinforcement makes the adoption ...

pnas.org

How does social network structure amplify or stifle behavior diffusion? Turns out, complex contagions are more complicated than we thought … (1/7)

How do language models track mental states of each character in a story, often referred to as Theory of Mind? We reverse-engineered how LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct handles a belief-tracking task and found something surprising: it uses mechanisms strikingly similar to pointer variables in C programming!

Join us for our “Human-AI Teaming for People and Planet,” workshop at the CI'25 in San Diego human-ai-teaming-at-ci2025.netlify.app

🚀 Now accepting applications for the new MS in Complex Network Analysis at Northeastern! Study real-world systems—social, financial, biological, public health—using cutting-edge network science tools. 🌐 Info: shorturl.at/bKUZV 📅 Live Webinars (starting April-May): shorturl.at/xrory

What will be the linchpin for AI dominance? Read our NSF/OSTP recommendations written with Goodfire's Tom McGrath tommcgrath.github.io, Transluce's Sarah Schwettmann cogconfluence.com, MIT's Dylan Hadfield-Menell @dhadfieldmenell.bsky.social TLDR; Dominance comes from **interpretability** 🧵 ↘️

How a Northeastern @nunetsi.bsky.social student spearheaded a new exhibit on network science at the Museum of Science in Boston news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/n...

AI has effect on worker compensation not only for supply-demand reasons but also psychological ones: people reduce worker compensation just for using AI #AI #FutureOfWork arxiv.org/abs/2501.13228

With differentiated products and heterogeneous consumers, it may be hard for choices to deliver maximal welfare. We might regret choices we make, and we might miss out on products we would have enjoyed. @imkereimers.bsky.social @jwaldfog.bsky.social, and I explore this www.nber.org/papers/w33401

Information and the Welfare Benefits from Differentiated Products

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

nber.org