Repository for the Winter 2026 Computational Social Science Workshop
Time: 11:00 AM to 12:20 PM, Thursdays Location: Room 295, 1155 E. 60th St
Madalina Vlasceanu is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability and the Director of the Climate Cognition Lab. Her research focuses on the cognitive and social processes that give rise to emergent phenomena such as collective beliefs, collective decision-making, and collective action, with direct applications to climate policy. Guided by a theoretical framework of investigation, her research employs a large array of methods including behavioral laboratory experiments, social network analysis, field studies, randomized controlled trials, megastudies, and international many-lab collaborations, with the goal of understanding the processes underlying climate awareness and action at the individual, collective, and system level.
She obtained a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University in 2021 and a BA in Psychology and Economics from the University of Rochester in 2016. Prior to Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.
Behavioral Interventions Increasing Climate Awareness and Action at the Individual, Collective, and System Level
Given the urgency of climate change, a rapidly growing body of research across the behavioral sciences has tested interventions aimed at stimulating pro-climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we propose a framework conceptualizing this body of work at three levels of analysis, ranging from individual cognition to collective action and systemic change. At the individual level, interventions primarily target cognitive or affective processes to increase climate beliefs and stimulate pro-environmental behaviors. Effective interventions at this level include the decreasing of spatial, temporal, and social psychological distance of climate change. At the collective level, interventions aim to stimulate climate advocacy and civic engagement, overcoming social or political barriers to climate mitigation. Promising interventions at this level include emphasizing the efficacy and emotional benefits of collective action. And at the systemic level, climate action can be facilitated, accelerated, and scaled, through structural interventions leveraging policy innovations, infrastructure development, algorithmic deployment, entertainment outlets, or educational tools. Incorporating insights across the individual collective and system levels through interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaborations stands to maximize the behavioral sciences’ contributions to the climate crisis response.
Mina Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2023. Her research is at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction (HCI).
Her research group studies the evolving relationship between humans and AI, with a special focus on Writing, Reading, and Thinking with AI. Concretely, they design and evaluate AI systems (e.g., autocomplete system), identify opportunities and risks of AI-assisted writing, reading, and thinking (e.g., design space for writing assistants), and assess AI’s impact through user studies, controlled experiments, and surveys (e.g., reading comprehension). They also examine broader implications, such as how AI may reshape social norms around authorship (e.g., disclosure of AI use), transform education, and influence everyday communication.
Writing with AI: Capturing Its Influence, Designing Its Future
How is AI changing what we write, how we write, and who we are as writers? In this talk, I will first introduce CoAuthor, a platform that records keystroke-level human-AI interactions, and show how we can use CoAuthor to analyze AI’s effects on language, ideation, collaboration, and beyond. Second, I will present a design space of AI writing assistants derived from a systematic review of over 100 papers, highlighting potential trade-offs, alternative design choices, and gaps in current research. Finally, I will share ongoing projects and invite an open discussion on the future of writing with AI.
Reading List
- CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities
- A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
Fiery Cushman is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where he directs the Moral Psychology Research Laboratory. His research aims to organize the astonishing complexity of moral judgment around basic functional principles. Much of it is motivated by a simple idea: Because we use punishments and rewards to modify others’ behavior, one function of morality is to teach others how to behave, while another complementary function is to learn appropriate patterns of behavior. His laboratory investigates these issues using a wide range of methods, including surveys, laboratory behavioral studies, psychophysiology, infant and child research, functional neuroimaging, economic games and formal modeling. The ultimate goal is to use the moral domain to understand phenomena of more general importance: the balance between learned and innate contributions to cognition; the human capacity to explain, predict and evaluate others’ behavior; the relationship between automaticity and control; and the architecture of learning and decision-making in a social context. He received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, where he also completed a post-doctoral fellowship.
Cognitive Foundations of Contractualist Morality
Among scientific theories that attempt to explain the function of morality, a common theme is that morality helps people with disparate interests find mutually beneficial arrangements—the kinds of agreements that they would agree to in negotiation. The same theme arises in contractualist philosophical theories of morality. If these theories are right, what cognitive mechanisms help guide our moral judgments towards mutually beneficial agreements? After all, we cannot literally sit down and bargain over every moral norm. I will present our recent research on several cognitively efficient mechanisms that approximate the outcome of actual idealized bargaining, and that inform our moral judgments.
Reading List