Mohamed A. Hussein

New paper out in @JCRNEWS How do consumers react to political ads that meddle in the primaries of the opposing party? In the most recent elections, Democrats did something strange.

Conditionally accepted at the APSR (w/ @scottclifford & @patrickpliu): Why does political information so often change beliefs but NOT attitudes? We highlight the role of belief relevance, or the extent to which beliefs bear on attitudes.

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms: osf.io/preprints/psya… 🧵

"when opinions felt more linked to identity, people were more likely to choose candidates with extreme views than those with moderate views." - @MAHusseinLab, Zakary L. Tormala, & S. Christian Wheeler ow.ly/Yhhf50Xf1ti

New #SPSPblog: Why Do People Prefer Extreme Political Candidates? by @MAHusseinLab, Zakary L. Tormala, & S. Christian Wheeler ow.ly/8ttB50Xf1j5

Check out some fantastic new research from @RobbWiller 's lab led by @jonasp_schone!

🚨 Call for PostDoc or Visiting PhD Student 🚨 We're seeking an American Politics scholar of leg. institutions or representation, under the direction of Jim Curry, Jeff Harden, and Rachel Porter (me!), affiliated with our Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab

Curious about the digital twin dataset and how the digital twins were created? Read more here: pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.12…

Your responses will help inform how people perceive the potential (and limitations) of digital twins in simulating human judgement and decision-making.

👬 A Digital Twin Mega-Study! Researchers at Columbia University asked both humans and their “digital twins" to complete the same set of tasks. How closely did digital twins mirror their human counterparts?

Very astute piece by @anniekarni on how Democrats are embracing working-class candidates. My research lab has multiple ongoing projects on this very idea, so stay tuned for some empirical data coming soon! nytimes.com/2025/09/07/us/…

Datadog is one of the largest infrastructure success stories of the last decade. Now they’re betting on AI: a SOTA in-house time series model, observability for AI, and more. I talked to Datadog CEO @oliveur about Datadog’s AI strategy and where he thinks things are going:

The paper is now out, and you can read it here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lhYz51f8wWD3 This is joint work with Zak Tormala and Christian Wheeler at Stanford.

We see the DV of choice of extreme candidates as an understudied one in psychology. I hope we see more research on it. We also think that studying how people assess whether a candidate is extreme or moderate would be an exciting future direction.

🚨New Paper🚨 Elected officials are increasingly extreme. E.g., a recent analysis of 84,000 state-level candidates found that extreme candidates are now winning at the highest rates in 30 years. Why are people increasingly drawn to extreme candidates?