Assistant Professor @cmuhcii studying the psychology of technology. Previously at @nyuniversity, @Gates_Cambridge & @Stanford. @ForbesUnder30
New York, USA
Joined November 2013
- Tweets6.9K
- Following3.2K
- Followers5.6K
- Likes23K
Pinned Tweet
🚨New paper in @TrendsCognSci 🚨
Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?
@Jayvanbavel and I review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological and structural factors that shape information spread online and offline.
Thread 🧵(1/n)
Steve Rathje retweeted
Grant applications have become a lottery. A 60% growth in applications to one of the world’s most prestigious research-grant programs is resulting in an exceptionally low success rate
I think this is one of the major problems of AI--it's creating tsunami of grant applications and turning the decision process into chaos.
Grant decisions already felt fairly random and this seems to make the system worse.
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Steve Rathje retweeted
New working paper: Can AI forecast treatment effects in economics from pre-registration documents?
Answer: Yes. 1/
Steve Rathje retweeted
This is one of the most important pieces of social science on human and AI interaction that I’ve seen in some time. Experts follow agentic advice the vast majority of the time (causally), but only a tiny fraction credit the agent—majority think they came to decision on their own volition.
Reminds me of the classic Nisbett and Wilson study on people following outside influence without realizing it
“ But as more work is handed to AI—including AI safety research—these judgment calls are the main levers for people's own values to influence outcomes.
If people defer to AI without noticing, then "human in the loop" might provide less assurance than people expect.”
Steve Rathje retweeted
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
Steve Rathje retweeted
AI-generated writing is "increasingly optimized for [goals] in which there is a pressure for information density rather than successful [human] communication": examples from this paper:
Joint work with @kmahowald and Matias Martin at UT. Check out our pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2610.29162
Steve Rathje retweeted
New in @PNASNews:
In two large experiments (~18k obs from ~14.8k people), we find that brief conversations with AI can get people to take real political action - incl. signing real petitions and giving money to charity.
Surprisingly, the persuasion strategy that worked best for changing people's attitudes - packing convos with info - was the least effective at changing behavior!
🧵
Steve Rathje retweeted
Collective deliberation leads to large, depolarizing changes in policy attitudes and large decreases in affective polarization.
Deliberation requires that people use good information to “weigh” competing arguments through civil and diverse discussion, enabling them to decide on the merits of arguments. A few hours in these discussions can have dramatic effects.
The more extreme people were before deliberation, the more feelings toward members of the other party rose with deliberation. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Steve Rathje retweeted
Phones in school impair learning.
The results from a large randomized controlled trial involving 16,683 students across 10 higher education institutions found that phone bans improve students’ academic achievement, with particularly pronounced benefits for low-performing students.
The effect size of removing phones was about one third as big as the effect of changing from an average teacher a very good teacher for an entire academic year.
Students who experienced the in-class phone bans also became significantly more supportive of such restrictions and perceived them as beneficial. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Steve Rathje retweeted
New in Science: we randomized phone-free classrooms for 16,000+ students across 10 institutions in Odisha, India. Students deposited phones in a box at the start of each class, for a full semester.
Steve Rathje retweeted
I was having this same conversation yesterday about how AI will disrupt psychological research:
If I had bet, I'd wager that:
- short opinion/review pieces are going to become very hard to publish (or those journals will be spammed with AI slop)
- collecting interesting, real-world data or field experiments will be increasingly valuable and distinctive
- archival analyses will become popular, but potentially face a glut of submission
- social networking (and social skills) will be increasingly valuable
- grad admissions and job interviews will increasingly sample skills that can't be faked using AI (e.g., chalk talks)
- journals/conferences will face a peer review collapse due to increasing submission
- AI will quickly be integrated into peer-review to prescan every paper for errors, omissions, etc
- faculty will get exhausted from being spammed by AI agents and slop and will disengage from email with strangers
With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here's what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally:
✅The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.)
✅ Field experiments will rise in value and generally making "connections" with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand
✅ Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it
✅Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts.
✅Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage.
⚠️Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this "bread and butter" research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for "peer-reviewed" research.
Steve Rathje retweeted
I spoke with @nprpolitics this week about #AI sycophancy and some things to be aware of if you turn to LLMs this election season. You can check it out here:
npr.org/2026/10/04/nx-s1-597…
Steve Rathje retweeted
Thrilled to announce that I will be joining @UMiamiPsych as an Assistant Professor next year!
I am recruiting a PhD student to start in Fall 2027 — please reach out if you are interested in joining the lab!
For more info check out my website: dan-mirea.com
Steve Rathje retweeted
Econ is greatly positioned for the AI wave because the obsession with publishing a few killer papers in top journals leads economists to use AI for quality enhancement rather than to increase quantity. This is exactly what you want!
Steve Rathje retweeted
How much misinformation do we encounter?
A large systematic review (400+ studies) by @sacha_altay finds wildly diverse estimates, and provides context for the diversity—how and at what level it was estimated explained more of it than platform or topic:
buff.ly/FGZCYyI
Steve Rathje retweeted
My latest for @TheEconomist: AI writing is taking over politics.
10% of what was is said in Parliament is now AI-drafted, per Pangram. Yet more in the House of Representatives, or in Australia and Canada.
Link: economist.com/britain/2026/0…
And a 🧵 below, w/ some main offenders
Steve Rathje retweeted
We have a new paper on the study of epistemically suspect beliefs.
It's part of a special issue focusing on the need for more interdisciplinary research on false beliefs by bringing clinical psychology into the conversation. We argue that research on social identity can help explain how people select information and social environments, evaluate evidence, and process information in ways that affirm their identities.
Extending these insights to clinical contexts raises new questions about how social and personal identities shape susceptibility to certain beliefs, including in emerging information environments shaped by artificial intelligence.
You can read our short paper here: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8p…
It was written with Raunak Pillai & Steve Rathje
Steve Rathje retweeted
New paper: we found a pain direction in 25 open LLMs. It's distinct from fear and negative valence, and it fires for harm to the model but not to the user. Turn it up and models press a button to make it stop, even when the button deletes the user's files or their kids' photos.🧵
Steve Rathje retweeted
They deleted most of a mouse's cortex before it was born, filled the empty skull with human neurons, and the mouse walked, learned and remembered
doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-1…
Steve Rathje retweeted
Introducing: Time Machine Experiments 🚀 ⏳
in which participants 'travel' to the past, and interact with a mind from the year 1930 (simulated by an AI with knowledge cut-off).
Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.15468
This is an example of what we recently called "Science Fiction Science" (Sci-Fi-Sci)
Led by our @Max_Planck_CHM member @hiromu1996 @schimmelrob and Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, together with @LevinBrinkmann Alejandro H. Artiles and Jean-Francois Bonnefon @azimshariff
