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Austin van Loon
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Austin van Loon is an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
His primary stream of research investigates the dynamic relationship between culture and identity in the context of intergroup conflict. He explores critical questions such as: How do genuine differences in worldviews contribute to conflict between groups? How does conflict influence groups' perceptions of the world? And how can we structure intergroup interactions to foster cooperative behavior and shared understanding?
In his secondary research stream, Professor van Loon advances the application of artificial intelligence in the social sciences. He focuses on how scientists can leverage methods like machine learning and natural language processing to rigorously develop and test social theory.
Professor van Loon earned his PhD in sociology from Stanford University. He also holds a BS in sociology and a BA in psychology from the University of Iowa.
Publications
Featured Publication
"Predictability Hypotheses: A Metatheoretical and Methodological Introduction."van Loon, Austin. In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, edited by Christian Borch and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Featured Publication
"Regional Negative Bias in Word Embeddings Predicts Racial Animus—But Only Via Name Frequency."van Loon, Austin, Salvatore Giorgi, Robb Willer, and Johannes Eichstaedt, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7090-22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, January 2022.
Guilbeault, Douglas, Austin van Loon, Katharina Lix, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer B. Srivastava. Management Science. Forthcoming.
van Loon, Austin, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer B. Srivastava. Communications Psychology Vol. 2, No. 1 (2024).
van Loon, Austin. Nature Human Behaviour Vol. 7, (2023): 484-501.
van Loon, Austin and Jeremy Freese. American Behavioral Scientist Vol. 67, No. 2 (2023): 175-200.