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.
Mosleh, Mohsen, and David G. Rand, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6688-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, August 2022.
Pennycook, Gordon, Jonathon McPhetres, Bence Bago, and David G. Rand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin Vol. 48, No. 5 (2022): 750-765. Download Paper.
Jordan, Matthew R., William T. Dickens, Oliver P. Hauser, and David G. Rand. Behavioural Public Policy Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022): 302-324. Download Paper.
Stopping the spread of misinformation while maintaining free speech is a major challenge for social media companies. The Birdwatch program allows users to provide additional context for tweets.
A new research paper by Prof. David Rand, and colleagues found that Ukrainians who engaged in more analytic thinking were less likely to believe pro-Kremlin disinformation.
"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.
Poor "truth discernment" (i.e., the ability to tell fake news from real stories) is driven primarily by a lack of careful reasoning.
"Since 2016, [social media] platforms have been under a huge amount of public pressure to act on misinformation."
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