Michael Bernstein

Empirical evidence that people can build highly predictive mental models of even complex AIs, if and only if the algorithm fulfills three criteria:

CSCW folks, I wanted to highlight how excited and proud I am to see work from our community (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/..., CSCW '24 best paper winner led by @jiachenyan.bsky.social and @mlam.bsky.social) grow and expand ambition into this Science paper. CSCW has a ton to offer the world.

This was such a cool experiment that I created a Zentropi labeler with a simplified version of the authors' Partisan Animosity criteria. Now anyone can experiment directly with using this labeler to try to reduce the temperature of affective polarization in their feeds. zentropi.ai/labelers/b30...

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

Current CASBS fellow Jeanne Tsai & fmr fellow @mbernst.bsky.social among coauthors of NEW ARTICLE @science.org unveiling a new method to reduce exposure to highly partisan social media posts & improve users’ attitudes Coverage: news.stanford.edu/stories/2025... Pub: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨New WP!🚨 Structured AI Dialogues Can Increase Happiness and Meaning in Life In a preregistered RCT, four psychology-grounded #AI chatbots improved well-being across several outcomes. Co-authors: Jonas Schoene, Johannes Eichstaedt, Aadesh Salecha, Sonja Lyubomirsky 🧵👇

Stanford Engineering (@StanfordEng) launched an open-rank faculty search in design. It can place candidates in any department in our School of Engineering: facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49... I'm thrilled to bring in more colleagues at the intersection of engineering+design!

Thank you to everyone for your energy and enthusiasm in joining this adventure with me so far!

Thrilled to share that I’ve successfully defended my PhD dissertation and I will be joining MIT as an Assistant Professor starting Fall 2026, with a shared appointment between Sloan and EECS! I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students this upcoming cycle. Consider applying to MIT EECS!

Very cool to see this research developed into a policy brief! Impactful work from a superstar team: @joon-s-pk.bsky.social @cqzou.bsky.social ‬ @aaronshaw.bsky.social @mako.cc Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, @robbwiller.bsky.social Percy Liang, @mbernst.bsky.social

Take a 👀 at this policy brief from @stanfordhai.bsky.social on how AI agents can test ideas in social science. Honored to be part of this amazing team: @joon-s-pk.bsky.social @cqzou.bsky.social @aaronshaw.bsky.social @mako.cc Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, @mbernst.bsky.social

A policy brief on what generative AI simulations of people might be good for! (based on work with the amazing team of @joon-s-pk.bsky.social @cqzou.bsky.social @mako.cc @robbwiller.bsky.social @mbernst.bsky.social Merrie Morris, Carrie Cai, and Percy Liang)

📣 Calling all #CHI2025 attendees who work with human participants: Join our panel discussion on #LLM, #simulation, #syntheticdata, and the future of human subjects research on Apr 30 (Wed), 2:10 - 3:40 PM (JP Time) Post your questions for panelists here: forms.gle/m2mXY3xFafAX...

Should we use LLMs 🤖 to simulate human research subjects 🧑? In our new preprint, we argue sims can augment human studies to scale up social science as AI technology accelerates. We identify 5 tractable challenges and argue this is a promising and underused research method 🧪🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234

This might be the most useful thing I have come across in social media - a personalized feed of academic papers filtered by your follower network! Highly recommend. #academicsky

New funding opportunity for Wikimedia-related research! Grants up to $150K available. Apply by April 16th: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:...

Book announcement: with Melissa Valentine, we are publishing "Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work." It's a leadership book synthesizing a decade of Stanford research on how computing, online platforms, and AI reshape teamwork. Coming October from @mitpress.bsky.social!

It was great to see so many attendees at the seminar from Michael Bernstein on Friday. Thanks for visiting, @mbernst.bsky.social. The recording of "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior" is available at the web page below. @kenholstein.bsky.social @bradamyers.bsky.social

Our next #HCIISeminarSeries talk & Sujeath Pareddy Memorial Lecture will be Michael Bernstein @mbernst.bsky.social of Stanford University. 🎙️"Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior" 📅 Feb. 28, 2025 🕜1:30pm ET 📍NSH 1305 + livestream 🔗 Details: hcii.cmu.edu/news/event/2...

Weiser (2025)—Sal awakens: she smells coffee. A few minutes ago her alarm clock had quietly asked "coffee?", and she had mumbled "OK." Her Alexa alarm clock did its best with the mumbled response: "Playing OK Go." Sal cried out: "Alexa, stop!" The assistant leered at her. "Alexa. Alexa! ALEXA!"

The move to use LLMs to enforce platform codes of conduct is going to expose all the intentional vagueness in the policies. LLMs can certainly enforce what is written in the policies, but I bet it’s going to yield a bunch of undesired changes to enforcement patterns.

Applications to the Stanford Symbolic Systems lecturer position is due on the 15th. If you're interested in teaching and mentoring careers in academia, consider applying!

📣 The #CSCW2026 deadline (@acm-cscw.bsky.social) has been posted. Big change this year. There is **only one deadline** for 2026 and it is May 13, 2025. 📣 Please spread the word! #CSCW #CHI #HCI #socialcomputing cscw.acm.org/2025/index.p...

I thoroughly enjoy reading this methods paper by McGrath (1981) www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/52... He views the research process as not a set of problems that need to be solved but dilemmas that need to be lived with. There is not "one true" method free of limitations; all are flawed in dif ways

How do people *really* read Wikipedia? 📖 👀 We explored how readers navigate, fall into rabbit holes, and engage with information in a chapter for the ‘Handbook of Computational Social Science,’ edited by @tahayasseri.bsky.social. Stay tuned for the full book! 📚 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program is hiring a three-year lecturer position: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/program/...

Big congratulations to @helenasresearch.bsky.social on winning a 2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award! cra.org/about/awards...

Stanford is hiring! The School of Engineering seeks an Executive Director for a new facility that will support student-led organizations that design and build things. Awesome opportunity. Feel free to reach out with questions: stevecollins@stanford.edu careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/directo...

Most popular emoji used on all of Bluesky 😭

The question of whether to boot Singal is one of what will be an increasingly large number of decisions that Bluesky as an organization really does not want to make. It's important to remember that Bluesky was created with an ethos directly opposed to central authority making these decisions.

A great class concept with a website so funky that the Fresh Prince himself would probably enroll

Palo Alto public phone chassis replaced by an open book exchange. Love it.

If you are headed to NeurIPS, please join for our Pluralistic Alignment workshop! We have a great set of speakers from a range of backgrounds. & all the papers that will be presented at the workshop are posted: pluralistic-alignment.github.io lmk if you'd like to catch up at the conference too! :)

Realtime LLM social media reranking enables field experiments demonstrating how we can depolarize. Congratulations @tiziano.bsky.social, @msaveski.bsky.social, and @jiachenyan.bsky.social!

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization? We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

Last week at CSCW, Catherine Han presented our work on journalists' unmet needs for protecting against harassment online. While the work targeted Twitter/X, it surfaces several nuances in users' needs that span future platforms as well (e.g., not wanting to filter out threats or visibly block users)

Tiziano has a technical talent that has enabled him to go after incredibly ambitious computational social science projects. Keep an eye out for one of them coming soon!

Wednesday, at CSCW: @mlam.bsky.social and Chenyan Jia present their Best Paper award winner, "Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective Functions" hai.stanford.edu/news/buildin...

Coming very soon: #cscw2024 panel on "Is Human-AI Interaction CSCW?" alongside @asbruckman.bsky.social, @jeffbigham.bsky.social, @andresmh.bsky.social, and Merrie Morris! programs.sigchi.org/cscw/2024/pr...

This paper argues that online spaces become ghost towns because it's too easy to lurk without contributing, and that asking people to regularly re-commit—or the incoming messages start getting muted—reverses the trend. arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267 It works! #cscw2024 paper by @popowski.bsky.social .