Steven Rathje is a postdoc at New York University and an incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the psychology of technology, which includes how people engage with a variety of digital tools, especially those with social implications. We talk about his work on what makes content go viral online and the consequences of AI chatbots that are more agreeable than maybe they ought to be. Along the way, we see how basic principles of psychology govern social life in these digital spaces, too.
A few things that come up:
- Lack of change in conspiracy beliefs over time (Uscinski et al., 2022)
- The psychology of virality (Rathje & Van Bavel, 2025)
- Testing the effects of AI sycophancy (Rathje et al., 2025)
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