William J. Brady

Abstract and results summary

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

Cool work! Did y'all look at how people update when they discover AI makes an error?

Our new paper finds that AI can overcome partisan #bias

We find that AI sources are preferred over ingroup and outgroup sources--even when people know both are equally accurate (N = 1,600+): osf.io/preprints/ps...

missed you @baixuechunzi.bsky.social !

Thanks to our rotating organizers: lead organizer Tessa Charlesworth & co-organizers: @chujunlin.bsky.social Brent Hughes Xuechunzi Bai

Post any questions here!

We are now accepting submissions for posters and data blitz! If your research is computational (broadly construed) you should apply! We try to program for a wide range of topics and computational approaches.

Submission guide here: spsp.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/EdvejV...

Deadline: October 23rd 🎃

The computational psych preconference is back @spspnews.bsky.social for a full day! This year's lineup:

👉theory-driven modeling: Hyowon Gweon
👉data-driven discovery: @clemensstachl.bsky.social
👉application: me
👉 panel: @steveread.bsky.social Sandra Matz, @markthornton.bsky.social Wil Cunningham

Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? Why does the online world seem so toxic compared with normal life? Our research shows that a small number of divisive accounts could be responsible – and offers a way out

Only a small % of people engage in toxic activity online, but they’re responsible for a disproportionate share of hostile or misleading content on nearly every platform

Because super-users are so active, they dominate our collective impression of the internet www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

The digitally accountable public representation database: online communication by U.S. officials - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The digitally accountable public representation database: online communication by U.S. officials

New dataset that describes social media activity of a very large group of US elected officials: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My proposed solution is to not write more 150 pg papers 🤣

And here we are

Really cool work led by @hongkai1.bsky.social ✨ observational and experimental studies finding that differentiation helps explain the evolution of negative discourse online!

@aoc.bsky.social come hang out at Northwestern and we'll take you surfing on the great lakes!

Me surfing a wave in the Rockaways.

Sitting on a surfboard in the ocean with an instructor.

I have been taking surfing lessons. Still in the beginner kook trenches, but celebrating my last time on a foam board 😎

Graduating to a hard top next session.

It’s fun to learn new things! Even if you look like a goober at the beginning. 🏄🏽‍♀️

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

I suspect we are already at the point where students view writing a dissertation without LLMs the same as us millennials viewed writing a dissertation on a typewriter, i.e., unfathomable. No value judgment, just interesting how quickly that escalated.

Whom to pity, whom to scold? Effects of empathetic and normative AI-assisted interventions on aggressive Reddit users with different activity profiles During a six-month experiment conducted on Reddit, we studied the impact of counter-speech interventions against personal attacks sent by 440 users re…

Attempts at reducing online aggression (ie, cruel Reddit comments) by increasing empathy (eg, "There is a human being on the other side who might be hurt by your words") tended to backfire. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@unroll.skywriter.blue

Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation | PNAS Third-party punishment is theorized by some scholars to be essential to the evolution of large-scale cooperation, but empirically, it often fails t...

"psychological biases to overestimate the influence of self-interest on others’ behaviors and to attribute malicious intentions to those who harm us may create inherent challenges for punishment to effectively promote cooperation"

Apply to the awesome DRRC postdoc position at Kellogg. Open to any scholar who studies conflict and cooperation, very broadly construed. We’ve had some amazing people come through over the years. Note the earlier application deadline this year (Nov 1)!

📢JOB POSTING: Senior Director for the Center for Enlightened Disagreement (CED).📢

@nourkteily.bsky.social and I seek a strategic leader to help us build the Center (see ensuing post for information about CED).

Target salary range: $125,000-$155,000.

1/2

careers.northwestern.edu/psc/hrnu_er/...

Check out our new pre-print in which we argue something that might be obvious but doesn't seem to be obvious to everyone: Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) do not simulate human psychology.

We have a really fun cross-disciplinary group of of faculty associated with DRRC you can work: www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-re...

Are you interested in topics related to conflict and intergroup relations *broadly construed*? Come join us as a postdoc in the Dispute Research Research Center! This position is up to 3 years, comes with your own research funding, and a phenomenal network of past DRRC postdocs.

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Had a great time teaching a CSS workshop at SISPP - thanks to all the students and organizers! Future of social psych is looking bright 😎

If you're at @aomconnect.bsky.social #AOM2025, come check out our panel on NLP in organizations, featuring @dholtz.bsky.social, Sameer Srivastava, @williambrady.bsky.social, @mikeyeomans.bsky.social & me! We'll explore topics including hiring, cooperation, agency, and moral outrage -- don't miss it!

Excited to have contributed to this work led by @curtispuryear.bsky.social!

Using large-scale text analyses, we show that moralization has increased on social media over the past decade and a half, less so on traditional media

English language is filled with trait words like “caring” and “smart”

These words are the currency of personality/social psych, yet key questions remain about their evolution, function, and structure

We take on these questions in a preprint led by @yuanzeliu.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/ps...

One of the largest-scale analyses of historical text data that I have contributed to

The finding: language on social media has become more moralized over the 21st century; we don't see the same trends on news media

Kudos to the first author @curtispuryear.bsky.social on the enormous effort