I am a professor of sociology and, by courtesy, of psychology and organizational behavior, at Stanford University, and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. As a sociologist and social psychologist, I use large-scale experiments and AI tools to build social scientific knowledge and help public agencies and civic organizations improve individual and societal welfare. I direct two labs at Stanford, the AI for Public Benefit Lab and the Politics and Social Change Lab. Through both, we try to produce rigorous evidence that can help people make important decisions.

 

At the AI for Public Benefit Lab, I study how AI can be put to work for people’s well-being and for civic life. Our research streams include:

 

• forecasting the results of experiments and policy interventions

• simulating the attitudes and behavior of individual people

• giving voters accurate, nonpartisan election information

• measuring how persuasive AI-generated messages are

• testing whether structured conversations with a chatbot can improve emotional well-being

 

At the Politics and Social Change Lab, I study polarization, persuasion, and democracy, including partisan animosity and how to reduce it, support for democratic norms and structural reforms, the effects of protest tactics on public support for social movements, and Americans’ economic policy preferences. Much of this research comes back to one idea: in a country as large and diverse as the U.S., mobilizing people who already agree with you is rarely enough to effect change. Instead, durable social change occurs when people find common ground sufficient to build a powerful coalition, often by persuading people who disagree with them. For example, my research on moral reframing finds that people are more persuasive when they make arguments that connect with the moral values of their audience, rather than their own.

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Background

 

I’ve published more than 100 articles. My work has appeared in Science, Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. My research has also appeared in leading journals of sociology, psychology, political science, and organizational behavior, including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science. Working across different fields helps me improve the quality of my research. My recent work includes a 2026 Nature paper showing that large language models can accurately predict the results of social science experiments, and research on AI persuasion credited in Science as the first demonstration that generative AI could write persuasive policy messages.

 

I co-organized the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a megastudy published in Science that tested 25 crowdsourced interventions on more than 32,000 Americans. I am also co-organizing the Structural Democratic Reforms Project, which gathers proposals for reforming American democratic institutions and then has experts evaluate them.

 

My lab preregisters its studies, publishes null results, and shares data and materials. In 2025 I received the Open Science Champion Prize from Stanford’s Center for Open and Reproducible Science. I was a longtime faculty co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and I’ve twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

 

Beyond the academy, I’ve advised government agencies, NGOs, and companies on using social science for public benefit, through paid and unpaid advising, consulting, and research partnerships. These include the White House COVID-19 Response Team, the U.S. Surgeon General, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Evaluation Sciences, the National Governors Association, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ideas42, Anthropic, and OpenAI. I’ve advised trust and safety teams at several technology companies. Data I gathered was cited in the Last Resort Exoneration Project’s successful appeal on behalf of two men, which won their release after 25 years. I benefit scientifically from applied work, because partners typically have practical knowledge, earned through years of working directly on social problems, that is difficult to learn any other way.

 

My writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Vox. I’ve appeared on the NBC Nightly News, PBS NewsHour, Morning Joe, Fox News, and NPR, and my research has been covered by hundreds of news outlets around the world. My 2017 TED talk, “How to Have Better Political Conversations,” has been viewed more than three million times. I speak regularly to academic, policy, philanthropic, and civic audiences, including at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I’m represented for speaking by The Lavin Agency.

 

Before coming to Stanford, I was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where I won the 2009 Golden Apple, the only teaching award given by Berkeley’s student body. My course “Self and Society” became the highest-enrollment and highest-rated (on CourseRank) course on campus, and it is now one of the largest at Stanford. I earned a PhD and MA in sociology from Cornell University and a BA in sociology from the University of Iowa.

 

I grew up in Kansas and South Carolina. Before academia, I worked as a line cook, dishwasher, construction worker, and delivery driver. My background shapes my interest in how people from different walks of life understand themselves and the world around them. I’m grateful that I get to do what I do, and I’m eager to do research that helps people change society for the better.