Assistant Professor
Management of Organizations | Sustainability
Leading researcher in computational sociology and online social network experiments
About
Douglas Guilbeault is an Assistant Professor in the Management of Organizations Group at the Haas School of Business. He studies how people learn, challenge, develop, and invent categories by communicating in social networks. This investigation extends to the analysis of how organizations mediate and augment social computation by enabling new forms of communication, coordination, and creativity. This investigation further extends into how the social construction of meaning can be shaped by various sources of influence, such as political messaging and the design of social media platforms. His work on these topics has appeared in a number of top journals, including Nature Communications, The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, and Management Science, as well as in popular news outlets, such as The Atlantic and Wired. Guilbeault’s work has received top research awards from The International Conference on Computational Social Science, The Cognitive Science Society, and The International Communication Association. In addition, he was a recipient of Stanford’s “The Art of Science” award for the piece “Changing Views in Data Science over 50 Years” produced in collaboration with the research collective, comp-syn. Guilbeault has also worked as a consultant on social media policy and people analytics for leading tech companies (e.g., Google and Facebook). His current research is funded by Facebook and the NIH.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Social Media Policy
- Categorization
- Culture and Cognition
- Collective Intelligence
- Computational Sociology
- Collective Creativity
- Douglas Guilbeault, Andrea Baronchelli, and Damon Centola. Experimental Evidence for Scale Induced Category Convergence across Populations. Nature Communications.
2021 - Joshua Becker, Douglas Guilbeault, and Ned Smith. The Crowd Classification Problem: Social Dynamics of Binary Choice Accuracy. Management Science.
2021 (Forthcoming) - Douglas Guilbeault, Joshua Becker, and Damon Centola. Social learning and partisan bias in the interpretation of climate trends. PNAS.
2018 - Robert Gorwa and Douglas Guilbeault. Unpacking the Social Media Bot: A Typology to Guide Research and Policy. Policy and Internet.
2018
At Haas since 2020
2021 – present, Faculty Affiliate, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)
2020 – present, Assistant Professor, Management of Organizations, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellowship
2020
Stanford’s Art of Science Award
2020
Changing Views in Data Science over Fifty Years
Facebook Content Moderation Policy Research Award
2019
Networked Crowdsourcing: An Online Experiment in Content Moderation. w. Damon Centola. ($100,000)
Computational Modeling Prize in Applied Cognition
2019
The Social Network Dynamics of Category Formation. The 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. w. Andrea Baronchelli and Damon Centola. ($1000)
Best Paper Award
2018
Bipartisan Social Networks Reduce Political Bias in the Interpretation of Climate Trends. The International Conference on Computational Social Science. Kellogg, Northwestern, July. w. Joshua Becker and Damon Centola. ($1,000)
Dissertation Award
2018
The Network Dynamics of Interdisciplinary Research. The Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, The University of Michigan. ($15,000)
Top Student Paper Award
2018
What should we do about Political Automation? Challenges for Policy and Research. Communication & Technology Division, The International Communication Association, Prague, March. w. Robert Gorwa.
- Why independent cultures think alike when it comes to categories: It’s not in the brain, phys.org, 01/12/2021
- How seeing a political logo can impair your understanding of facts, PBS News Hour, 09/03/2018
- Regulating Bots on Social Media Is Easier Said Than Done, Slate, 08/09/2018
- How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots, IEEE Spectrum, 10/18/2018
- Tinder nightmares: the promise and peril of political bots, Wired UK, 07/07/2017
- Social Media’s Increasing Role In The 2016 Presidential Election, NPR, 11/07/2016
- How Twitter Bots are Shaping the Election, The Atlantic, 11/01/2016