Austin van Loon
General Information
My research centers around meaning: how we make it, how we come to (dis)agree on it, how it shapes what we do, how it shapes what we get, and how we can measure it. My areas of interest are social psychology, the sociology of culture, organizational sociology, economic sociology, and methodology. I have substantive interests in U.S. politics and workplace inequalities. In my research, I make use of a broad range of tools, including: automated text analysis, machine learning, network analysis, experiments, and observational causal inference. Check out my personal website (austinvanloon.com) for more information!
I am a member of the Computational Culture Lab, a member of the Polarization and Social Change Lab (PaSCL), and an alumnus of the 2019 Princeton Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS). I am a Stanford Ric Weiland fellow and have received additional funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Lab for Social Research (LSR), as well as the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS). My work has been published in American Behavioral Scientist, The Proceedings of EMNLP, The Proceedings of ICWSM, PLOS ONE and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Publications and Writings
van Loon, Austin. 2022. “Three Families of Automated Text Analysis”. Social Science Research (50th anniversary special issue), 108:102798. (check out the paper here)
van Loon, Austin , Salvatore Giorgi, Robb Willer, and Johannes Eichstaedt. 2022. “Negative Associations in Word Embeddings Predict Anti-Black Bias Across Regions—but Only via Name Frequency”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2022. (check out the paper here)
van Loon, Austin and Jeremy Freese. Forthcoming. “Word embeddings reveal how fundamental sentiments structure natural language”. American Behavioral Scientist. (check out the paper here)
van Loon, Austin, Sheridan Stewart, Brandon Waldon, Shrinidhi K. Lakshmikanth, Ishan Shah, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Garrick Sherman, James Zou, and Johannes Eichstaedt. 2020. “Explaining the ‘Trump Gap’ in Social Distancing Using COVID Discourse”. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020. (check out the paper here)
van Loon, Austin. 2020. “Health Behavior Disparities Along Party Lines and Associative Diffusion”. ASA Culture Section Newsletter. (check it out here)
Matthew Salganik, Ian Lundberg, Alex Kindel … Austin van Loon … Sara McLanahan. 2020. “Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(15): 8398-8403. (check out the paper here)
van Loon, Austin, Jeremy Bailenson, Jamil Zaki, Joshua Bostick, and Robb Willer. 2018. “Virtual reality perspective-taking increases cognitive empathy for specific others”. PLOS ONE, 13(8):e0202442. (check out the paper here)
Working Papers
Guilbeault, Doug, Austin van Loon, Katharina Lix, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava. “Cognitive Diversity Promotes Social Learning—But Only When Cognitive Differences Are Obscured”, Revise and Resubmit at Management Science. (check out the working paper here)
van Loon, Austin, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava. “Imagined Otherness: Outgroup Dehumanization Arises from Perceived Schematic Difference”. (check out the working paper here)
