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Volunteer Science

Volunteer Science offers people around the world to become involved in scientific projects on everything from... more

News & Announcements

Volunteers Still Needed

We are still recruiting volunteers for studies on human behavior. We are interested in people from anywhere in the world. Link: https://volunteerscience.com/

Report on Communication in Aftermath of Boston Marathon Bombing

This recently released report is based on survey data from communication on the day of the Boston Marathon Bombing.

POSTDOC 2016

Two postdoctoral positions in computational social science are available with dual appointments at Northeastern and Harvard Universities, to work in the lab of David Lazer.  Candidates will be expected to work on a combination of their own research and collaborative proj

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Lab People

Janette M. Briceno
Project Manager
Jason Radford
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Briony Swire Thompson
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Stefan McCabe
PhD Student
Ronald Robertson
PhD Student
Sarah Shugars
PhD Student
Navid Dianati
Lab Alumnus
Samuel Fraiberger
Lab Alumnus
Ryan P. Kennedy
Lab Alumnus
Katherine Ognyanova
Lab Alumnus
more...

Recent Publications

Journal Article
Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Publication date: 01/2019
Authors: Nir Grinberg, Kenny Joseph, Lisa Friedland, Briony Swire Thompson, David Lazer

The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016...

OP ED
Representing Is Hard. Online Town Halls Can Help
Publication date: 12/2018
Authors: Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, David Lazer

OPINION — At the end of the movie “The Candidate,” Robert Redford’s character wins a Senate seat, and then...

Peer Reviewed Computer Science Conference
Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search
Publication date: 11/2018
Authors: Ronald Robertson, Shan Jiang, Kenny Joseph, Lisa Friedland, David Lazer, Christo Wilson

There is a growing consensus that online platforms have a systematic influence on the democratic process. However, research beyond social media is...

Journal Article
How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence
Publication date: 08/2018
Authors: Ethan Bernstein , Jesse Shore, David Lazer

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces...

Working Paper
A Scalable MCEM Estimator for Spatio-Temporal Autoregressive Model
Publication date: 07/2018
Authors: Philipp Hunziker, Julian Wucherpfennig, Aya Kachi, Nils-Christian Bormann

Very large spatio-temporal lattice data are becoming increasingly common across a variety of disciplines. However, estimating interdependence...

Journal Article
"How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information"
Publication date: 04/2018
Authors: William Hobbs, Margaret E. Roberts

Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We...

Conference Proceeding
Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text
Publication date: 04/2018
Authors: Nir Grinberg

Prior work established the benefits of server-recorded user engagement measures (e.g. clickthrough rates) for improving the results of...

“The Science of Fake News”
Publication date: 03/2018
Authors: David Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, Jonathan L. Zittrain

The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against...

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