Summit website: u.osu.edu/mindmachinea...
Submission form: osu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
09.03.2026 20:38
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Summit website: u.osu.edu/mindmachinea...
Submission form: osu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
One week left to submit to the Mind & Machine Alignment Summit! ⏳
Propose a talk, experience, or project idea by March 16.
We have a phenomenal lineup of speakers doing cutting-edge work in this space, and we’re excited to hear your ideas!
Is God really dead, and is technology the murderer? Many theorized that technological advancement would erode belief in higher powers, but it instead appears to reduce supernatural explanations for everyday events. Join me tomorrow at the SPSP Religion and Spirituality Preconference to hear more!
Join me at the SPSP Roundtable Unconference to discuss how psychologists can strengthen AI alignment! We’ll cover recent work in the psych-AI space, talk career paths & interdisciplinary collabs, and map research priorities to help steer fast-moving tech toward the public good. @spspnews.bsky.social
Speakers include:
@lpargyle.bsky.social, @mohammadatari.bsky.social, @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social, @allisondman.bsky.social, @kurtjgray.bsky.social, @joshcjackson.bsky.social, @chinasa.bsky.social, @steverathje.bsky.social
Learn more: u.osu.edu/mindmachinea...
We're excited to announce the first Mind & Machine Alignment Summit at Ohio State!
Join leaders from social science and the AI industry to advance AI that promotes well-being and aligns with human values. Learn about emerging work and connect with leading researchers and builders.
Social scientists can help collect globally representative training data, embed social insights into model design for AI safety, and strengthen human feedback methods. Great work is happening, but we still need much more social science-computer science cross-talk.
AI alignment has two sides: machines and people.
Computer scientists study the first, social scientists the second, and we need more collaboration between these spheres.
Interesting finding by @danicajdillion.bsky.social et al. - a good reminder that how we connect matters just as much as what we believe.
#SocialScience #SocialNetwork #USPol
We are facing a crisis of disconnection and this is directly linked to polarization.
New research finds that people living in communities with denser social networks consistently reported less partisan animosity and a greater sense of national unity.
link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...
Building denser, more interconnected communities might not just boost wellbeing—it could also help heal political divides.
We encourage future research to explore this possibility further.
Many thanks to coauthors @kurtjgray.bsky.social and Kevin Lewis!
Full open-access paper here: rdcu.be/ePGvH
Second, all main results are correlational. Our experimental manipulation produced only a series of indirect effects culminating in lower partisan animosity.
We hope these results inspire future interventions to test whether fostering denser social networks can reduce partisan animosity.
Open questions remain. First, warmth toward opponents was consistently tied to regional network density, but results for individual density were mixed.
These relationships were robust across political parties and regional population sizes.
And interestingly, they didn't depend on the political makeup of someone’s network. Even if your close others share your party, denser networks still predicted more openness to opponents.
This regional pattern replicated across:
📊Our own participants
📊A second nationally representative dataset (139,389 people, 3,032 counties)
People living in communities with denser social networks consistently reported less partisan animosity.
Next, we zoomed out to the county level. Using data from the Social Capital Atlas and Project Implicit, we found that counties with denser social networks showed lower partisan animosity—even after accounting for population, politics, demographics, and inequality.
We first asked a representative sample of Americans how well their 7 closest contacts know each other.
Those in denser social networks showed more openness (and indirectly, more warmth) toward political opponents through stronger feelings of unity with close & distant others.
We find that people embedded in denser social networks—where your close friends and family know each other—feel more unity not just with loved ones, but also with distant fellow Americans.
Your everyday sense of “we’re in this together” may extend to the national level.
Americans are growing more socially isolated and politically divided.
Our new paper in Applied Network Science suggests these two forms of disconnection may be linked. People with denser, more connected social networks often feel less partisan animosity.
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New piece with @helenldevine.bsky.social and @kurtjgray.bsky.social👇
www.moralunderstandingnewsletter.com/p/1-in-5-dog...
A person and a puppy are drowning in a lake. You can only save one—who do you choose? 1 in 5 dog owners would choose the puppy.
Are our relationships with our fur babies getting in the way of those with people?
New post (🔗 below 👇)
We hope WorldValuesBench supports building LLMs that are safer, fairer, and more culturally aware.
Led by Wenlong Zhao with Debanjan Mondal, Niket Tandon,
@kurtjgray.bsky.social, and Yuling Gu
Code: github.com/Demon702/Wor...
Paper: aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-ma...
The World Values Survey is one of the most widely used datasets on global values:
🌏 94,728 participants across 64 countries in the latest wave
📊 Representative national samples
🗣️ Primarily face-to-face interviews
❓ 200+ value questions spanning social, political, economic, and moral domains
What makes WorldValuesBench different?
🎯 Fine-grained demographics: 42 attributes (age, gender, country, urban/rural, etc.)
🌐 Breadth of values: social norms, trust, economics, religion, politics, and more
📊 Scale: 20M examples for evaluation
📏 Distributions rather than averages of human values
LLMs are already shaping advice, education, and policy around the world. To be safe and serve global users, it's important they reflect cultural variation in values rather than a single “global average” or disproportionately Western views.
🌍 Introducing WorldValuesBench!
A benchmark to evaluate how well LLMs reflect cultural differences in human values.
Built from 94k+ participants in the World Values Survey → 20M examples of (demographics, value question → answer).
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Huge thanks to brilliant coauthors @helenldevine.bsky.social and @kurtjgray.bsky.social!
Preprint available here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Data, code, and preregs here: osf.io/d94b8/
Dogs are amazing companions.
But when love for dogs surpasses love for people, it can come at a cost: less concern for others and deeper social disconnection.
For many, dogs aren’t just valued as much as people—they’re valued more.
This can have real impacts: Owners chose to give more to animal charities than those helping people, including a children's hospital and food bank. 🐶>🏥🥫
Even children in need can come second to dogs.
Dog owners were more likely than non-owners to prioritize dogs, but even non-owners scored high on these measures.
This suggests that seeing dogs as soulmates is widespread. 🐶💞