Faculty
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Team, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Bridging the fields of cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and “fake news,” understanding political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation. David received his BA in computational biology from Cornell University in 2004 and his PhD in systems biology from Harvard University in 2009, was a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology from 2009 to 2013, and was an Assistant and then Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics, and Management at Yale University prior to joining the faculty at MIT.
David's work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and has received widespread attention from print, radio, TV, and social media outlets. He has also written popular press articles for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, and the Psychological Observer. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, and awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, and the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.
Pennycook, Gordon and David G. Rand. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 25, No. 5 (2021): 388-402. Download Paper.
Pennycook, Gordon, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. Nature Vol. 592, (2021): 590-595. Download Paper.
Peysakhovich, Alexander and David G. Rand. Scientific Reports. Forthcoming.
Tappin, Ben, Adam Berinsky, and David G. Rand. Nature Human Behaviour. Forthcoming.
Epstein, Ziv, Nathaniel Sirlin, Antonio Arechar, Gordon Pennycook, and David G. Rand. Science Advances Vol. 9, No. 9 (2023).
Mosleh, Mohsen and David G. Rand. Nature Communications Vol. 13, No. 7144 (2022): 1-9.
Research finds Democrats and Republicans react to persuasive messaging in ways that don’t always align with their party leader’s stated positions.
An MIT-led study reveals a core tension between the impulse to share news and to think about whether it is true.
"Americans are more receptive to information that challenges their party leader's position than we had previously thought.”
Prof. David Rand was named to the 2023 Thinkers50 Radar Class, an annual list that honors 30 people who are expected to make an impact.
"Recent initiatives suggest that platforms may be able to channel partisan motivations to democratise moderation."
So far, Birdwatch users appear to be motivated as much by politics as by truth, said [Prof.] David Rand.
Over six weeks, you’ll explore the technical and strategic considerations for robust, beneficial, and responsible AI deployment. You’ll examine the various stages of a proprietary ML Deployment Framework and unlock new opportunities by investigating the key challenges and their related impact. Guided by leading experts and MIT academics, you’ll build a toolkit for addressing these challenges within your own organization and context.
This business process improvement course introduces a structured approach to design and customer analysis processes that draws on important trends that have become essential to successful innovation in today’s businesses: the digitization of all business processes; the blending of product and service into integrated solutions; considerations around environmental sustainability; and the use of globally-distributed teams.
