Bio

I am a sociologist who uses causal inference to study why people support or oppose policies designed to reduce economic inequality and poverty.

As part of this research program, I also develop quantitative methods to improve how social scientists produce and analyze causal evidence, with a focus on the opportunities and limitations of artificial intelligence.

I am on the job market in 2026–2027.

Publications

2026 Americans Favor Predistributive Over Redistributive Economic Policies. With J. Kamphorst and R. Willer. PNAS.
2025 The Mixed Subjects Design: Treating Large Language Models as Potentially Informative Observations. With M. Howes and A. van Loon. Sociological Methods & Research.
2024 Coming into Relations: How Communication Reveals and Persuades Relational Decisions. With D. McFarland, V. Prabhakaran, and D. Jurafsky. Social Networks.

Work in Progress

2026 Post-training Makes Large Language Models Less Human-like. With M. Binz et al. arXiv preprint.
2026 This Human Study Did Not Involve Human Subjects: Validating LLM Simulations as Behavioral Evidence. With J. Hullman, H. Sun, and A. Shaw. arXiv preprint.
2026 Belief in the American Dream Reduces Support for Welfare Programs. With L. Santos and R. Willer. Manuscript available upon request.
2026 Civility Is Necessary but Not Sufficient for Productive Conversations Online. With B. Park, A. Mack-Crane, D. McFarland, and B. Lee. Manuscript available upon request.
2026 Predicting Experimental Effect Sizes with Finetuned LLMs. With L. Hewitt, …, and R. Willer. Manuscript available upon request.
2026 Cluster-Robust Prediction-Powered Inference. With M. Howes. Manuscript available upon request.
2026 Behavioral traces distinguish bots and AI-assisted humans in online surveys. With N. Stagnaro and H. Lin. Manuscript available upon request.
2026 Leveraging Large Language Models to Predict Results of Social Science Field Experiments. With J. Kamphorst, M. Bernstein, and R. Willer. Manuscript available upon request.

Teaching

I have taught and assisted courses in economic sociology, regression for discrete outcomes, computational social science, and research design.

Materials

My current CV is available here. Replication materials for my research are available on OSF.