Ideas Made to Matter
Meet the 6 new faculty members joining MIT Sloan in 2024
The academics and researchers joining MIT Sloan in 2024 are experts in economics, management, organizational studies, and more.
Jul 8, 2024
Faculty
Austin van Loon
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Austin van Loon is the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a standing faculty member of the Organization Studies program, a core faculty member of the Economic Sociology program, and a faculty member of the Managerial Communications group.
Van Loon’s research falls into two streams: one substantive and one methodological. In the substantive stream of his research, he studies the various interplays between culture, identity, conflict, and technology. Recent topics he’s investigated include how artificial intelligence is changing higher education, why Americans are so hostile towards those of differing political beliefs, how to foster better discussions online, and how to promote effective social learning among managers.
The second stream of Van Loon’s research is methodological. In it, he advances scientists’ and practitioners’ understanding of how to use artificial intelligence to better understand human behavior. The most recent work in this stream involves combining simulations of human behavior generated with artificial intelligence alongside observations of human behavior to improve causal inferences. He has also worked on the use of machine learning to advance social theories, the automated analysis of human language, and the measurement of cultural differences.
Van Loon teaches Communication for Leaders, a core MBA course designed to equip students with persuasive strategic communication skills crucial for driving meaningful organizational change.
Publications
Featured Publication
"Predictability Hypotheses: A Metatheoretical and Methodological Introduction."van Loon, Austin. In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, edited by Christian Borch and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Featured Publication
"Regional Negative Bias in Word Embeddings Predicts Racial Animus—But Only Via Name Frequency."van Loon, Austin, Salvatore Giorgi, Robb Willer, and Johannes Eichstaedt, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7090-22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, January 2022.
"Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence—But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured."
Guilbeault, Douglas, Austin van Loon, Katharina Lix, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer B. Srivastava. Management Science. Forthcoming.
"The Mixed Subjects Design: Treating Large Language Models as Potentially Informative Observations."
Broska, David, Michael Howes, and Austin van Loon. Sociological Methods and Research. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
"Designing Social Media to Promote Productive Political Dialogue on a New Research Platform."
van Loon, Austin, Srikar Katta, Christopher A. Bail, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and Alexander Volfovsky, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7152-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, September 2024.
"Imagined Otherness Fuels Blatant Dehumanization of Outgroups."
van Loon, Austin, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer B. Srivastava. Communications Psychology Vol. 2, No. 1 (2024).
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