David Rand
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dgrand.bsky.social
David Rand
@dgrand.bsky.social
32K followers 1.7K following 300 posts
Prof at Cornell studying how human-AI dialogues can correct inaccurate beliefs, why people share falsehoods, and ways to reduce political polarization and promote cooperation. Computational social science + cognitive psychology.
https://www.DaveRand.org/
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dgrand.bsky.social
David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · Dec 16
🚨In Science🚨
Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, ya?
WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20%!
-Lasts over 2mo
-Works on entrenched beliefs
-Tailored AI response rebuts specific evidence offered by believers
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
1/
[X->BSky repost]
Reposted by David Rand
dgrand.bsky.social
🚨New WP🚨
Dialogues with our AI DebunkBot:
✔️Reduced belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories among believers
✔️Effect durable at 1+ month
✔️Improved attitudes towards Jews among initially negative participants

🟰Debunking works for deeply rooted, identity-linked conspiracies
osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 22, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by David Rand
byrdnick.com
🧠🏔️ Below I'll share mine and others' presentations from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference in #Denver.

Did you attend a session I missed?
Did I fail to tag a presenter?
Feel free to add to the thread!

Long live #openAccess conferencing.

#SJDM #SJDM25 @sjdm-tweets.bsky.social
Byrd, N. (2025, July). Map My Words—Using Waitlist Controlled Trials To Test Whether Argument Mapping Improves Individuals’ Persuasive Writing or Critical Thinking. Experimental Argument Analysis, University of East Anglia. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390977878 Abstract. Argument mapping is the practice of diagraming the logical relationships between each proposition in an argument, including objections and counter-objections. Some studies find that courses that teach students how to map arguments exhibit better critical thinking and persuasive writing than students in other courses. These promising results are sometimes from surveyors of argument mapping goods and services, and they garner plenty of attention in fields that champion careful thinking and communication. However, the total evidence is mixed, null results are often never published, and many promising studies have not controlled for known confounds. Two waitlist control trials (N = 83) attempted to address these issues; they detected no benefits of argument map training within or between groups (p > 0.13). Rather, variance in outcomes was explained by enrollment in the instructor’s other courses, prior academic achievement, and — most robustly — engagement in flipped classroom activities. These findings raise questions about whether benefits previously attributed to argument mapping in less controlled studies were caused by other factors that were already known to produce such benefits. Implications for pedagogy, course assessment, and the science of learning are discussed.
November 22, 2025 at 6:35 PM
dgrand.bsky.social
🚨New WP🚨
Dialogues with our AI DebunkBot:
✔️Reduced belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories among believers
✔️Effect durable at 1+ month
✔️Improved attitudes towards Jews among initially negative participants

🟰Debunking works for deeply rooted, identity-linked conspiracies
osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 22, 2025 at 3:23 PM
dgrand.bsky.social
I'll be at SJDM in Denver today through Sunday (I'm presenting on AI political persuasion on Sat @ 230pm). Let me know do you'd like to chat!
November 21, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by David Rand
usapolling.bsky.social
"Do you think that Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein?"

All:
Yes: 42%
No: 34%

Yes Among:
DEM: 79%
IND: 43%
GOP: 7%

YouGov / Nov 17, 2025
November 18, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by David Rand
dgrand.bsky.social
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
Examining news on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by David Rand
katestarbird.bsky.social
Preprint w/ (rapid) analysis of Grokipedia, showing it to be “highly derivative of Wikipedia”, but differing, often on controversial topics, in that Grokipedia includes content/cites from low quality (hyper partisan & conspiracy laden) sources like Stormfront & Infowars. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685
arxiv.org
November 14, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by David Rand
acarv.in
"On all platforms we studied, a given user’s posts with links to lower-quality news sources receive more engagement on average than their posts with links to higher-quality news sources."
dgrand.bsky.social David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 13d
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
Examining news on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 14, 2025 at 2:43 PM
dgrand.bsky.social
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
Examining news on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by David Rand
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
Updated paper

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mjih7...
November 12, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Reposted by David Rand
ethanvporter.bsky.social
Fact-checks improve accuracy. But can they penalize spreaders of misinfo? At @polbehavior.bsky.social, Jacob Ausubel, Annika Davies and I show that the answer is yes--sometimes. Unknown misinfo producers can be penalized, but well-known figures get off. Link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The Reputational Penalty: How Fact-Checking Can Penalize Those Who Spread Misinformation - Political Behavior
Whether or not political leaders pay a price for spreading misinformation has profound implications for democracy. In this paper, we identify the conditions under which corrections of misinformation c...
link.springer.com
November 10, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by David Rand
jeffgreene.bsky.social
Adults who were required to use #GenAI to answer LSAT questions did better than a no-AI control group, but the GenAI group also exhibited greater metacognitive inaccuracy. I'd like to see some conceptual replications before drawing firm conclusions. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
AI makes you smarter but none the wiser: The disconnect between performance and metacognition
Optimizing human–AI interaction requires users to reflect on their performance critically, yet little is known about generative AI systems’ effect on …
doi.org
November 10, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by David Rand
brendannyhan.bsky.social
"While high-quality content is posted more and receives more total engagement across platforms...a given author attracts higher levels of engagement when they post lower-quality content"

"pattern we find seems to be driven more by an underperformance of particularly popular high-quality outlets"
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms | PNAS
In recent years, social media has become increasingly fragmented, as platforms evolve and new alternatives emerge. Yet most research studies a sing...
www.pnas.org
November 5, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by David Rand
bcfginitiative.bsky.social
Directions of Polarization, Social Norms, and Trust in Societies—a workshop organized by Team Scientist @dgrand.bsky.social, BCFG collaborator Eugen Dimant & colleagues—is now open for registration.

Register before October 30th: sites.google.com/view/polariz...
October 21, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by David Rand
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Regrettably relevant research today

Disguised Repression: Targeting Opponents with Nonpolitical Crimes to Undermine Dissent
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
October 9, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Reposted by David Rand
justinwolfers.bsky.social
Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued.

Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially.

Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.
September 22, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by David Rand
mememedianmode.bsky.social
What is taught in schools matters for political behaviors.
"Curriculum, political participation, and career choice" in REStat.
doi.org/10.1162/rest...
September 11, 2025 at 2:02 PM
dgrand.bsky.social
This is such a great idea/service!! Have Brendan-bot give you pre-submission comments on your paper!
brendannyhan.bsky.social Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · Aug 27
Just made a manuscript/PAP feedback GPT built from 150+ previous peer reviews - identifies problems and provides actionable feedback on the points that I raise most frequently
chatgpt.com/g/g-68af4d19...

Anyone can use - try it out! (Editors/authors: feel free to cut me out of the loop 😉.)
ChatGPT - Manuscript review assistant
A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges
chatgpt.com
August 31, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Reposted by David Rand
byrdnick.com
More toxic #Twitter posts from US Members of #Congress (MCs) were more likely to be reposted by liberal users — especially toxic posts about #Republicans.

This and more among 13,000,000 users and 1,300,000 posts from 2009 to 2019.

doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

#socialmedia #politics
August 28, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by David Rand
asociologist.bsky.social
"Alternative realities are endogenously conspiratorial to resist evidence better."

Fascinating to see this kind of paper in the American Economic Review! www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory
(September 2025) - We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If ...
www.aeaweb.org
August 28, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by David Rand
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Cong Rs & Ds "became more critical of the media between the 1960s & the 1990s and have polarized since. Rs...more negative about the media than at any time since 1939...elite criticism predicts subsequent declines in copartisans’ perceptions of journalists"
s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.prod....
August 28, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by David Rand
mattgrossmann.bsky.social
Legislators & staffers have a bias toward thinking the public is evenly divided on policy issues, rather than a conservative bias in perception; prior findings were based on policy questions where the liberal position was more popular
adamzelizer.com/wp-content/u...
adamzelizer.com
August 25, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted by David Rand
xphilosopher.bsky.social
Here is a ‘blame-praise curve’ for the percentage of household chores done by husbands

People think husbands are blameworthy if they do 20%, but praiseworthy if they do 40% (!)

Perceived average is above 40%, so people think below average is still praiseworthy

[Thread]
August 22, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by David Rand
taylorlorenz.bsky.social
A comprehensive review of research on the topic shows that “educating students in responsible phone use is a more sustainable and wholistic attempt to address problematic usage rather than enacting whole-of-school banning policies.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
August 22, 2025 at 10:53 PM