Accelerated research about generative AI
Emerging insights suggest road maps, policy recommendations, and calls for action regarding generative artificial intelligence.
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 Initiative, 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.
Featured Publication
"Shifting Attention to Accuracy Reduces Misinformation Sharing."Pennycook, Gordon, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. Nature Vol. 592, (2021): 590-595. Download Paper.
Featured Publication
"The Psychology of Fake News."Pennycook, Gordon and David G. Rand. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 25, No. 5 (2021): 388-402. Download Paper.
Peysakhovich, Alexander and David G. Rand. Scientific Reports. Forthcoming.
Tappin, Ben, Adam Berinsky, and David G. Rand. Nature Human Behaviour. Forthcoming.
Costello, Thomas H., Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6987-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2024. BlueSky. Twitter.
Lin, Hause, Haritz Garro, Nils Wernerfelt, Jesse Conan Shore, Adam Hughes, Daniel Deisenroth, Nathaniel Barr, Adam J. Berinsky, Dean Eckles, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6986-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, February 2024. 45-minute Lecture. Tweet Thread.
Emerging insights suggest road maps, policy recommendations, and calls for action regarding generative artificial intelligence.
In new policy briefs, MIT researchers outline how to regulate large language models, label AI-generated content, and pursue “pro-worker AI.”
Mendacity and the uncritical repetition of blatant lies can chip away at our ability to assess the plausibility of other, unrelated news stories.
Inattentive readers are more likely to click on a false news story, with misinformation content producers exploiting this attention gap.
"When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, 'I just don't trust anything anymore.'"
"Even professional journalists, as I understand it, are having a lot of trouble understanding what's true and what's not true."
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