Professor of Sociology, Psychology, & OB @Stanford Direct @PASL_Stanford and the AI for Public Benefit Lab
Palo Alto, CA
Joined August 2014
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Saturday's No Kings protests were massive, inclusive, and nonviolent. It was an honor to team up with @owasow to analyze how nonviolent resistance can wins hearts, minds, and elections.
Robb Willer retweeted
APPLY TO BE A 2027-28 CASBS PRACTITIONER FELLOW
Deadline: Dec 11, 2026
Learn about practitioner fellowships, the community practitioner fellows join, frequently asked questions & the application process, & access the practitioner fellowship application:
bit.ly/4i0vpRf
Cool quote from @carlislerainey's great piece!
I've also been thinking about the parts of social science I value that would be lost if we use AI to optimize the positivist aspects of social science, and what we can do about it.
There is valuable writing & thinking done even by positivist social scientists that would be lost in a world where AI helps us streamline papers to be extremely technically correct and faster to produce, writing and thinking that is aesthetic, exploratory, speculative, uncertain, subjective, and/or vague. That writing can be interesting, generative, and frankly fun. I don't want to lose it. And of course lots of academics work primarily in this register.
Preserving ample space for speculation, exploration, and aesthetic writing can support even the strictly positivist work in many ways, including by exploring the vast space of ideas with little constraint.
But at least in my fields, it has caused big problems that our unfalsifiable content is so closely intertwined with falsifiable, positivist work. The former work would be much more scientifically useful if categorized clearly, rather than bundled with work focused on testable theory.models, rigorous data collection and analysis, etc.
Beyond just enjoying beautiful writing on interesting topics, I also expect new findings and insights will be coming at us faster than ever. It will be helpful to preserve space for us humans to process it all - sharing our work with one another - and allowing for imperfect, incomplete, not yet testable thought that we freely share with one another as we collectively work through it all.
Robb Willer retweeted
🗓️ 𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐨 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐲 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬?
On 12/3, I'm hosting a free, 1 hr. online seminar called, "Doing Better Survey Experiments" from 1pm - 2pm (ET). Please help spread the word if you can! 🙏
instats.org/seminar/doing-be…
Robb Willer retweeted
Now published at @apsrjournal. Check out "The Symbolic Politics of Housing" doi.org/10.1017/S00030554261…
New results!
In "The Symbolic Politics of Housing," @dbroockman @j_kalla & I showed that public opinion about housing policies correlates w/ affect towards the groups that the policies make salient (via framing or criteria in the policy itself).
🧵/19
Robb Willer retweeted
New paper: "AI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best: Evidence and Policy Choices" See: GaryKing.org/peerless. with Steven Worthington. Comments welcome!
Robb Willer retweeted
varying user model varies p(eval). comparing with our sycophancy measure, we see that all models are more sycophantic the more they think they are deployed (vs being evaluated).
Robb Willer retweeted
A one-time 5% wealth tax would merely bring Silicon Valley billionaires' fortunes back to where they stood just a few weeks ago, at the beginning of September.
Back when their wealth was "only" 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They would rather see 3 million people lose their health insurance than allow that to happen.
Robb Willer retweeted
This is insane. We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization. But that is what’s happening right now.
Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system — including your bank account.
Pause AI NOW!
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Per Axios, detected AI agents access bank accounts with the customer’s permission. This violates most banks’ terms requiring human logins, which is why banks call it “unauthorized.”
Source: Axios (Oct. 22, 2026) — axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-…
Robb Willer retweeted
Things are moving so fast that everyone seems to have completely missed how insane it is that AI companies have been allowed to unleash agentic AI products with no regulatory guidelines.
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Robb Willer retweeted
No one changes the world alone
Introducing Ampersand - the first model built for us. Ampersand is a collaborator trained to help people achieve their individual and collective goals. In multi-month simulations, users collaborating with Ampersand accomplished more than with Fable and other frontier models
Available to everyone through our API
Robb Willer retweeted
Scientific fields where claims are more empirically testable have more equal citation distribution
Robb Willer retweeted
Friends: We have to stop running experiments where the outcome is a difference score. It is strictly worse in terms of statistical power. Control for the pre-treatment outcome instead!
Robb Willer retweeted
🚨New in PNAS: Our research shows how a ~7min AI chat can persuade people to take political actions👇
However, as noted by @Ben_Tappin, real-world impact is often limited by exposure [1]. To address this, we also present our results as an engagementmaxxed AI #slopcore music video
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!
🧵
Robb Willer retweeted
And there's more! We built an interactive explorer that lets you investigate candidate matchups across the corpus yourself.
Want to know what voters prefer, how results vary across studies, or where the evidence is thin? Explore here:
anonymouspoliticalscientist.…