Natasha Goel, PhD

How do political beliefs form and persist? I study how people engage with information across the digital media ecosystem (e.g., social media, AI chatbots, and search engines) and how this shapes their opinions and decisions. I consider this at two levels: individually, how biases, affect, and identities determine what information we consume and believe, and at the platform level, the incentives that drive what we see.

A second line of my work examines how AI is transforming this ecosystem and politics more broadly, and how public perceptions of the technology shape its safety and governance. Through this work, I aim to understand the political and social consequences of rapid technological change and to inform more responsible approaches to AI. Across both lines of work, I use large-scale survey experiments and computational social science tools.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University working with David Rand and Gordon Pennycook. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and was previously a Research Fellow at the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) and the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO).

My work appears in Journal of Experimental Political Science (JEPS), PNAS Nexus, Political Behavior, and Tech Policy Press.

Beyond research, ask me about movies, food & wine, the collection of essays I am working on, or how my running is going.