Can AI voter guides help voters decide while remaining accurate, nonpartisan, and trustworthy?

Very grateful to @stanfordimpactlabs.bsky.social for a new grant supporting our next work on this (building on work led by Joe Mernyk & Jonne Kamphorst):

bsky.app/profile/robb...

Announcing the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows — Guggenheim Fellowships: Supporting Artists, Scholars, & Scientists Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has given Fellowships to exceptional artists, writers, scholars, and scientists, empowering them to pursue meaningful work under the freest possible conditions.

Congrats to our own @robbwiller.bsky.social on being awarded the 2026 #GuggenheimFellowship for his outstanding and innovative work in #Sociology!

Read more about the @guggfellows.bsky.social: www.gf.org/stories/anno...

Very grateful to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. I’ve been so lucky to have such incredible students, collaborators, and mentors. Above all, I feel very lucky that I get to work on topics I care so deeply about with collaborators who are also my friends.✊❤️
#guggfellows2026

Thanks @austin-van-loon.bsky.social for sharing your creative work on how Americans' perceptions of the US influence their immigration policy attitudes!

@nature.com has published three groundbreaking papers on reproducibility, analytical robustness, and replicability across the social sciences. Sincere thanks are due to the many folks who contributed to these projects. It’s painstaking work, and a great service to social science.

Are you Chicago-bound for SPSP 2026?
Quick plug to the Politics & Social Change Lab affiliates presenting talks & posters on coalitions, issue advocacy, media framing, inequality, social media & well-being, and other topics. Very proud of them and their work! 😀
Details below 👇

🎉 Congratulations 🎉 to our lab director @robbwiller.bsky.social who has been honored by @spspnews.bsky.social for his work applying social/behavioral science to public policy through collaborations w/ @whitehouse-47.bsky.social COVID response team, US DOJ, & @natlgovsassoc.bsky.social, among others!

Thanks @pnasnexus.org for sharing our new work on AI authorship labeling and persuasion...check out their post to learn more!

Paper link: ow.ly/KXeE50YhHag

Isabel O. Gallegos, Chen Shani, @shi-weiyan.bsky.social, Federico Bianchi, Izzy Gainsburg, @jurafsky.bsky.social,
@robbwiller.bsky.social

Check out this super exciting work showing that AI-supported voter guides can be designed to be trustworthy and have a host of pro-democratic outcomes! @jsmernyk.bsky.social
@jonnekamphorst.bsky.social @adambonica.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social

How to Talk About Climate Change Across Political Divides A “tournament” of common climate messaging strategies finds which are more likely to sway opinions.

Thanks @gsb.stanford.edu for covering our work in their piece "How to Talk About Climate Change Across Political Divides" stanford.io/4jQi2Ct

Amazing work from Jan Voelkel @nmalhotra.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social & many others!

Original article in Nature Climate Change: rdcu.be/e1cbZ

Honored that our field experiment w Nat'l Governors Assoc won a 2025 Expy Award from Analyst Institute!

Congrats to @chagaiweiss.bsky.social @robbwiller.bsky.social and Don Green!

WP: osf.io/preprints/os...

Join Analyst Group to build more effective strategies for greater impact bit.ly/ExpyJoin

Huge thanks to @cydneydupree.bsky.social for an insightful presentation of her work investigating how White Americans’ use of values-based language shapes cross-racial affiliation! @robbwiller.bsky.social

Big thanks to Sarah Constantino for sharing her exciting research on social tipping points and climate change solutions with the lab this past Tuesday! @robbwiller.bsky.social

Thank you to @myra.bsky.social for her recent insightful presentation on how sycophantic AI can reduce people’s willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts! @robbwiller.bsky.social

Thank you to Kasey Rhee for an exciting recent presentation on her work analyzing how party registration has shifted across demographic groups using an unprecedented dataset of six billion voter records! @robbwiller.bsky.social

Proud to have our very own Ben Kinder present his undergraduate thesis research in our lab, focusing on pragmatic biases and strategic discrimination in American voting preferences. Excited to see where this work goes!

Thank you to @joshcjackson.bsky.social and Dan Medvedev for a fascinating recent lab presentation on how attitudes toward the rich vary globally! Innovative methods and fascinating findings, all around. @robbwiller.bsky.social

Big thanks to @kobihackenburg.bsky.social for sharing his comprehensive research program on the capacity of AI-Human conversation to facilitate attitude change. Really exciting stuff!

Check out more details in our paper (arxiv.org/abs/2511.01805), webpage (lm-belief-change.github.io), and code (github.com/JiayiGeng/lm...)

Co-authors include @howard-chen.bsky.social, Ryan Liu, @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social, @robbwiller.bsky.social, @gneubig.bsky.social, and Thomas Griffiths

Awesome work by Jiayi Geng leading this preprint investigating then question, "Do LM assistants change their beliefs as context accumulates?"

Thanks to Paul Lendway for presenting his work on sermon rhetoric and what it tells us about Evangelical alignment with the Republican Party. Looking forward to reading the book that comes out of this research! @robbwiller.bsky.social

🚨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

🧵👇

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF/prereg: osf.io/g59fm/
All chatbots linked above!

Major kudos to brilliant post-doc Jonas Schoene, who led this project!

Thanks to co-authors: Johannes Eichstaedt,, Aadesh Salecha, Sonja Lyubomirsky

And to: @stanfordhai.bsky.social, @stanfordpacs.bsky.social, @pascl-stanford.bsky.social, @uclaanderson.bsky.social

We find high public interest in using validated well-being chatbots.

In a nationally rep survey (N=3,056), about 1/2 of U.S. adults said they’d use empirically validated well-being chatbots. About 1/4 have already used #generativeAI chatbots for well-being.

Importantly, results generalized to key subpopulations, including those with high baseline levels of anxiety or depressed mood.

Linguistic analyses showed users had diff conversations with each chatbot:

Savoring → Sensory perceptions & positive emotions
Gratitude → Social interactions & positive emotions
Meaning → Reflection on others & cognitive processes
Hero’s journey → Achievement & cognitive processes

Does use tradeoff with human therapy?
Maybe, though initial evidence against: conversations increased willingness to try well-being chatbots again and to seek human therapy, even among those previously reluctant.

RESULTS: All four chatbots…

⚡️Improved happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning,
⚡️Reduced anxiety and depressed mood, relative to control.

Effect sizes exceed or match those from traditional positive psych interventions in @dunnhappylab.bsky.social recent meta-analysis.

#4: The Hero’s Journey Chatbot

Guides the user to reframe their life story in terms of the archetypal Hero’s Journey, highlighting challenges, strengths, and next steps (h/t Ben Rogers, @kurtjgray.bsky.social, Herrison Chicas)

👉 herobot.cpwbinterventions.xyz/readme