🚨Come work with us! 🚨 We're hiring a postdoc for Stanford's AI for Public Benefit Lab (ai4pb.stanford.edu), in partnership with @stanfordhai.bsky.social Open to PhDs from psych, poli sci, sociology, CS, econ, HCI, data science, etc. Please share! Position: postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

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Honored to give a keynote at Stanford's Trust & Safety Research Conference 2026 (Fri 8:45-9:30am). If you're going to be at the conference and want to connect, send me a message! drive.google.com/file/d/12Q_M...

Honored to give a keynote at Stanford's Trust & Safety Research Conference 2026 (Fri 8:45-9:30am). If you're going to be at the conference and want to connect, send me a message! drive.google.com/file/d/12Q_M...

Happy to share a new preprint with @tomcostello.bsky.social, @dgrand.bsky.social and @gordpennycook.bsky.social 🧵 "What beliefs are most debunkable?" osf.io/preprints/ps... We investigate the characteristics of the beliefs that are (or are not) influenced by counterevidence in 3,341 AI dialogues.

New paper: In Nov 2025, X began showing where accounts actually operate from. We studied 8,200 politically engaged accounts claiming to be in the US half were revealed to be elsewhere What happened when the mismatch went public? @yuweichuai.bsky.social @thomasrenault.bsky.social @dgrand.bsky.social

🚨New WP: Protecting users from AI persuasion🚨 🔸A 1-paragraph AI literacy treatment (explaining AIs can be told to pursue non-accuracy goals/to persuade) cuts AI dialogue political persuasion by ~half! 🔸No sig effect on general genAI trust arxiv.org/abs/2609.16432 w/ @rorchinik.bsky.social

🚨New WP: Protecting users from AI persuasion🚨 🔸A 1-paragraph AI literacy treatment (explaining AIs can be told to pursue non-accuracy goals/to persuade) cuts AI dialogue political persuasion by ~half! 🔸No sig effect on general genAI trust arxiv.org/abs/2609.16432 w/ @rorchinik.bsky.social

Do our social media algorithms correctly reflect our values? Our new article published today in @pnas.org shows that the answer is often not, and that the content that gets promoted into their ranked feeds is often actively counter to our values.

One of the most inventive and open-minded scientists I know. And also a rocker. :-)

David Rand@dgrand.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's been a real joy to return as a faculty member to my hometown and alma mater Cornell. This profile charts a bit of that journey - along with my thoughts on what punk rock and professing have in common, plus fun oldtime photos alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/...

It's been a real joy to return as a faculty member to my hometown and alma mater Cornell. This profile charts a bit of that journey - along with my thoughts on what punk rock and professing have in common, plus fun oldtime photos alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/...

How Is Academia Like Punk Rock? Ask Cornell Prof David Rand ’04 - Cornellians | Cornell University

Back at his alma mater, he’s making headlines for groundbreaking research melding AI, psychology, economics, poli sci, and more

alumni.cornell.edu

It's been a real joy to return as a faculty member to my hometown and alma mater Cornell. This profile charts a bit of that journey - along with my thoughts on what punk rock and professing have in common, plus fun oldtime photos alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/...

How Is Academia Like Punk Rock? Ask Cornell Prof David Rand ’04 - Cornellians | Cornell University

Back at his alma mater, he’s making headlines for groundbreaking research melding AI, psychology, economics, poli sci, and more

alumni.cornell.edu

🚨JOIN the Civic Discourse Mediator Competition🚨 In 1st week of August, create & test a prompt-based AI mediator that helps people have more thoughtful, productive conversations about important public issues. Win $400! Get started here: forms.gle/HkbhEk4hELQE...

Boy this was a long road, but glad it's finally out! @dgrand.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social @arechar.bsky.social (along with Michael N. Stagnaro, James N. Druckman, not tagable)

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · 4mo ago

Representativeness and response validity across nine opt-in online samples

Representativeness and response validity across nine opt-in online samples

Representativeness and response validity across nine opt-in online samples

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 22 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02438-zStagnaro et al. compare nine opt-in participant samples on measures of response validity, representativeness and professionalism. They find substantial variation across samples and offer guidance for choosing samples based on the research question.

dlvr.it

Congrats to an amazing team for award for THIS paper☝️ See news.cornell.edu/stories/2026... Thx for your much terrific & needed work, @arechar.bsky.social @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social @adamberinsky.bsky.social @ziv-e.bsky.social @kvg.bsky.social @robert-m-ross.bsky.social et al 🙏

Rand, Pennycook awarded for broad study of misinformation | Cornell Chronicle

The Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA) has chosen a study led by Cornell researchers as its publication of the year.

news.cornell.edu

We are thrilled to announce @dgrand.bsky.social as one of our keynote speakers for #TSRConf 2026! David is a professor at Cornell University, where his research draws on computational social science and cognitive science to understand how people form beliefs and decide what to share online.

Humanity's ability to know, reason, judge, and act well is the foundation of science, democracy, crisis response, & management of AI itself. AI poses serious risks to that foundation. New paper on epistemic risks by 30 experts calls for attention and proposes solutions. Link in thread.

When does punishing free riders help groups cooperate, and when does it backfire? A Science Magazine paper by Team Scientists @dgrand.bsky.social, Duncan Watts, Abdullah Almaatouq & co-author suggests the answer depends heavily on context. https://bit.ly/4uqUZm0

The Wall Street Journal had a conversation with @dgrand.bsky.social, a professor at Cornell University and co-author of the three papers, about how debunkbots can talk people out of believing conspiracy theories and what humans can learn from the endeavor. (WSJ-unlocked) www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-d...

How AI Talks People Out of Conspiracy Theories—and What We Can Learn From That

Research shows that the key is to clearly explain relevant facts. That isn’t always easy to do.

wsj.com

There has been a LOT of research on misinformation over the last decade. In a new paper (for Annual Review of Psychology), @dgrand.bsky.social and I attempt to distill the key points of consensus, highlight major disagreements, and point to future directions. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

Three BIG shifting dynamics: • Algorithms are dominating. • AI content generation is breaking the link between platforms and human content creation. • Public posting is decreasing dramatically, with conversations moving to non-public facing channels. Read more:

Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · 6mo ago

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

New study finds that correcting false health claims directly is as effective or more effective than trying to discredit the source, even if they lack expertise. iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Corrections outperform expertise‐based interventions for countering misinformation from alternative medicine sources

Given that health-based misinformation can cause serious harm, designing effective interventions is paramount. Recently, misinformation interventions that target a source's relevant expertise have sh....

iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New working paper: Rethinking Misinformation Interventions. The field has spent years searching for the one intervention that will solve misinformation. This search is the wrong approach — and our disappointment says more about our expectations than our tools. (1/5) osf.io/preprints/so...

Very excited to share that I'll be joining Social and Decision Sciences @cmu.edu as an assistant professor in the Fall! So grateful to everyone who has supported me, particularly my amazing advisors @dgrand.bsky.social & Rahul Bhui, family, & friends!

New paper with Gabriela Czarnek, @dgrand.bsky.social and @adamberinsky.bsky.social out in Political Behavior! Link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

After the Takeover: Rebuilding Trust in Public Media Through Institutional Reform - Political Behavior

We examine the dynamics of citizens’ trust in public media during government-led efforts to implement major media reforms in a highly polarized context using two cross-sectional experiments. After Pol...

link.springer.com

DebunkBot is live on BlueSky! Tag @debunkbot.bsky.social in reply to any post to get the facts

Extremely useful!

DebunkBot is live on BlueSky! Tag @debunkbot.bsky.social in reply to any post to get the facts