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Douglas Guilbeault

@douglasguilbeault.bsky.social
265 followers 340 following 32 posts

Assistant Prof. in Org. Behavior @StanfordGSB | Computational Culture Lab comp-culture.org | Social Networks, Cognition, Cultural Evolution, AI

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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
We are honored to receive this recognition for our work and to see it spurring generative conversation 🙏 computational social science is increasingly poised to reveal and help us address pervasive social distortions in internet culture and AI. Thank you for your interest!
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. I'd love to pick up on this thread when our paths cross (hopefully sooner than later!)
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Thanks Laura! Very interesting comment. I agree that variance is an important and underrepresented angle in this discourse. What are some of the valuable questions and/or insights that you think can from shifting focus toward variance?
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
I am without the words to describe how thrilled our team is to see our paper selected for the cover of @Nature! As the tagline captures, we hope our study empowers others to see how tools in computational social science can provide critical "reality checks" for our social world! @nature.com
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
I am incredibly honored to share that the Nature News team has released this fantastic video summarizing our paper and sharing my extended interview with Shamini Bundell. Shamini did a wonderful job! www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGT7...
youtube.com
Would ChatGPT hire you? Your age and gender matter
YouTube video by nature video
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Excellent coverage of our Nature paper (out today) by Mother Jones; their piece situates our findings in the broader context of evolving gender stereotypes over time and ongoing issues with biases in AI: www.motherjones.com/media/2025/1...
motherjones.com
It's true: The internet skews the reality of women (and men) in the workforce
Age and gender biases are baked into what we see online, a large new study confirms.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
I’m delighted to appear in this week’s episode of the @nature.com podcast, where we discuss our paper and its implications for the role AI is playing in reinforcing social biases on a large scale (e.g., via the biases ChatGPT introduces into hiring processes): www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
How stereotypes shape AI – and what that means for the future of hiring
Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 08 October 2025
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
The tldr of our study is captured in this short 3 minute video produced by Emma Richard: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vdw...
youtube.com
Age and Gender Distortion in Online Media and Large Language Models
YouTube video by Douglas Guilbeault
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
🚨I'm thrilled to share our newest paper in @nature.com “Age and Gender Distortion in Online Media and Large Language Models” with my amazing collaborators Solene Delecourt and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan! nature.com/articles/s41... See our 3 minute summary video in the comments😄
nature.com
Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models - Nature
Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differences in the workforce.
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jbunte-mein.bsky.social @jbunte-mein.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
I had a great time speaking w @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social about his research on my podcast "Yes, this". We discussed AI, LLMs, AlphaGo, social contagions, categorization, mass influence, the new science of culture, and much more. Link here: open.spotify.com/episode/18R0...
open.spotify.com
Emergent Meaning: Networks, AI, and the Geometry of Our Collective Mind with Douglas Guilbeault
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
I had a great time speaking w Julia Bunte-Mein about my research on her podcast "Yes, this". We discussed AI, LLMs, AlphaGo, social contagions, categorization, mass influence, the new science of culture, and much more. Link here: open.spotify.com/episode/18R0...
open.spotify.com
Emergent Meaning: Networks, AI, and the Geometry of Our Collective Mind with Douglas Guilbeault
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Arianna Pera @ariannapera.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Presented our work, “Cultural and Cognitive Insights from 2.6 Billion Drawings,” at @ic2s2.bsky.social this morning. Big thanks to Mauro Martino, Nima Dehmamy, @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social, and @baronca.bsky.social for the collaboration ✨ Stay tuned for more results!
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
An interesting direction for future research will be to explore whether (and ideally how) incorporating multimodal representations into LLMs shapes their capacity to emulate human embodied metaphorical reasoning, especially about metaphors relating to vision.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
This work also connects to our prior work demonstrating systematic differences in color perception btwn vision classifiers (based on deep neural networks & transformers) and humans. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Divergences in color perception between deep neural networks and humans
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly proposed as models of human vision, bolstered by their impressive performance on image classification and…
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
This work nicely complements a paper published last week showing that text-based LLMs struggle to recover sensorimotor aspects of human concepts: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Large language models without grounding recover non-sensorimotor but not sensorimotor features of human concepts - Nature Human Behaviour
Xu et al. find that large language models not only align with human representations in non-sensorimotor domains but also diverge in sensorimotor ones, with additional visual training associated with e...
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Huge kudos to Ethan Nadler for leading this effort, and for our fantastic global team of collaborators: Sofronia Ringold, Tom Williamson, Antoine Pepin, Iulia-Maria Comşa, Karim Jerbi, Srini Narayanan, and Lisa Aziz-Zadeh.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
This was a massive interdisciplinary effort – including physicists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and AI researchers from @Google DeepMind.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
This has implications for the ongoing conversation around whether and to what extent LLMs can be treated as meaningful emulators of human cognition for psychological and/or sociological studies.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
This suggests perceptual experience plays a role in metaphorical reasoning. It further suggests that LLMs are limited in their ability to recover the embodied aspects of metaphorical reasoning from statistical correlations among words alone.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
We show that LLMs’ struggle to reason coherently about novel color metaphors and are less likely to reference embodied experience in their interpretations. By contrast, painters exhibit the highest rate of embodied reasoning when interpreting novel color metaphors.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
𝐃𝐨 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐚? In a forthcoming paper in 𝐶𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, we show yes! But this synesthesia deviates significantly from the color associations of ppl, incl. colorseeing, colorblind, and painters. osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Benjamin Borowski 🍁 @typeoneerror.com · 12/04/2025
One of my latest choons already has 1K streams. Nice little surprise. A mournful drum and bass track in collaboration with @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social (aka metachemist). Nothing's better than getting a like or comment on SoundCloud!
soundcloud.com
Hyacinth's Fall
Like the flower blooming from Hyacinthus's blood, something new emerges from grief. (Guitar samples by metachemist)
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
New 💫 Letter to the Editor in Cognitive Science, by @samhforbes.bsky.social & @olivia.science lnkd.in/eea8Cwmd
Title page of paper:

To Improve Literacy, Improve Equality in Education, not Large Language Models
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Annenberg School at Penn @asc.upenn.edu · 03/04/2025
Researchers at Annenberg and @umdscience.bsky.social show that proposed NIH funding cuts lead to an estimated $16 billion in economic loss and 68,000 jobs lost nationwide. Learn about their project and view the interactive map here:
asc.upenn.edu
Data-Driven, Interactive Map Shows Local Economic Impact of Cuts to Federal Funding for Health Research
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Thank you for your interest! We welcome any and all feedback.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
We are deeply grateful to the authors of Centola & Baronchelli (2015) and Centola et al. (2018) for sharing their experimental data and for enriching discussion. We are also grateful to colleagues in the broader community who have given us helpful feedback, as highlighted in our acknowledgements.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Our framework not only provides more accurate predictions of behavioral data, but it also does so with a simple, highly interpretable mathematical model that synthesizes findings across the social sciences (from linguistics, psychology, economics, and sociology).
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Our findings highlight the benefit of adopting a theoretically-driven, psychologically-grounded angle toward modeling human social learning.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Despite their many achievements, the accelerating embrace of machine learning (and LLMs specifically) as a framework for simulating human learning is likely to maintain this blind spot, since such models are designed to emulate human behavior through a brute force, statistically optimized approach.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
One key takeaway in our view is that the currently in vogue optimization-based models of human cognition and behavior may systematically overlook some of the fundamentally simple and categorical processes that characterize human social learning as satisficing.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
The extent to which this simple ratio threshold improves predictions of how people learn rules across contexts, from linguistic grammar to behavioral conventions, is striking!
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
We identify this threshold using the Tolerance Principle, a simple equation first developed to model how children learn grammar. TP holds that any pattern defined over N items can only generalize if the number of exceptions does not exceed N/lnN; otherwise it is more efficient to memorize all items
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Instead, participants follow a two-stage learning process akin to satisficing: they behave probabilistically until they acquire enough information to trigger a mental threshold and then their behaviors stabilize.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
We find that dominant theories of social learning perform poorly at capturing how ppl learn conventions in coordination games that task them with matching behaviors in social networks. Participants' behavior systematically deviates from imitation and optimization (including Bayesian inference).
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
I’m excited to share a preprint of a new collaboration with Spencer Caplan (CUNY) and Charles Yang (Upenn): “A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions.” osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Shashank Shekhar lab @sshekhr.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Excited to share our new paper in Nature Physics @naturephysics.bsky.social: Cooperative hydrodynamics accompany multicellular-like colonial organization in the unicellular Stentor! How do single-celled organisms benefit from teamwork?
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Andrew Couts @couts.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Also, we've just removed the paywall for this.
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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 24/03/2025
Spurred by “alarming political interference in academic research by the Trump administration,” Brussels’s Vrije Universiteit (VUB), or Free University, allocated $2.7 million in funding last week for at least 12 new postdoctoral roles open to “censored Americans.”
washingtonpost.com
Europe races to lure U.S. scientists as Trump puts pressure on universities
Some European universities are offering funding for American scientists considering a relocation and promising a safe haven free from academic censorship.
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Joshua Becker @joshuabecker.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
ONE WEEK TO DEADLINE for Collective Intelligence 2025 submissions! Accepting non-archival AND proceedings submissions, to include contributions from a diverse set of academic traditions. More info here: ci.acm.org/2025/submit/
ci.acm.org
Call for Participation - ACM Collective Intelligence 2025
⏰ Submission Deadlines and Templates Collective Intelligence 2025 offers several opportunities to share your latest research and insights. All submissions should be submitted via EasyChair by the list...
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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
What was more interesting to me is the correlation between use time and loneliness. Higher use time was positively associated with loneliness. This is very likely driven by the fact that lonelier people are just more likely to spend more time with the chat.
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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Does daily use of ChatGPT reduce loneliness? I was very excited to see that OpenAI just published its first paper on GPT use and well-being with an experimental design. The outcome is quite disappointing . 🧵 www.media.mit.edu/publications...
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Simon Kirby @simonkirby.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
I love this insight. The friction in a creative act (in art, but also writing, science) is so crucial. The trouble, the difficulty, the finding a way past roadblocks is how we discover new things about the world and about ourselves. Be wary of tools (like AI) that promise to remove all the friction.
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Georg Rilinger @rilinger.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
I am very excited to see "Market Design as Organizational Problem" out at AJS: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1.... How do we explain systemic levels of destructive behavior in platform markets (system failures)? I suggest that we should focus on the organization that
journals.uchicago.edu
Market Design as Organizational Problem: Explaining System Failures in Platform Markets | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 0, No ja
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/03/2025
1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world. 
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
I’m excited to be featured tomorrow (915am PT) in Wikimedia’s Research Showcase for their Gender Gaps theme in lieu of Women’s History Month. I’ll be presenting our paper “Online Images Amplify Gender Bias”. The talk will be streamed live on Wikimedia's Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTd...
youtube.com
Wikimedia Research Showcase - March 2025
YouTube video by Wikimedia Foundation
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 17/08/2024
The intractability proof (a.k.a. Ingenia theorem) implies that any attempts to scale up AI-by-Learning to situations of real-world, human-level complexity will consume an astronomical amount of resources (see Box 1 for an explanation). 13/n
Box 1 in the paper, intuitively explaining the implications of the intractability result.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Top notch. "discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. ... Large Models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents, but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated."
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Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
How AlphaGo like architectures can explain human insight. Out now in Cognition!
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Sherry Pagoto, PhD @drsherrypagoto.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024. That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved. Show me a better investment than that. www.forbes.com/sites/michae...
forbes.com
NIH Grants Fueled $95 Billion In FY 2024 Economic Activity, Finds New Report
National Institutes of Health grants generated almost $95 billion in economic activity nationwide in FY 2024 according to a new report by United for Medical Research.
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Douglas Guilbeault @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
Really important piece that highlights an essential perspective for understanding current large-scale trends spanning not just academia but also politics
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