Michal Kosinski

Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior

Michal Kosinski

Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior

Academic Area:

Research Statement

Michal Kosinski’s research focuses on individual differences in behavior, preferences, and performance. Specifically, he is interested in the mechanisms linking psychological traits (such as personality) with a broad range of organizational and social outcomes, including job performance, person-job fit, consumer preferences, and ideology, as well as the expression and recognition of psychological traits from behavioral residues, language, and facial features. Kosinski conducts his research using a range of computational methods, including machine learning, data mining, and observational studies involving millions of participants.

Research Interests

  • Computational Social Science
  • Big Data
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Personality and Individual Differences
  • Psychological Assessment
  • Consumer Preferences
  • Facial Features

Bio

Professor Kosinski received his PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He was the deputy director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford’s Computer Science Department.

Kosinski’s research has had a significant impact on both academia and the industry. In pursuing his diverse research program, he has published over 70 papers in leading journals including Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Machine Learning, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They have been cited over 6,000 times.

Also, he had nothing to do with Cambridge Analytica.

Academic Degrees

  • Phd in Psychology, University of Cambridge, 2014
  • MPhil in Psychometrics, University of Cambridge, 2009
  • MSC in Psychology, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2008

Academic Appointments

  • Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford GSB, 2019–present
  • Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford GSB, 2015–19
  • Postdoctoral Scholar, Computer Science Dept., Stanford University, 2014–15
  • Visiting Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, University of Namur, 2012–13

Professional Experience

  • Deputy Director, University of Cambridge Psychometrics Center, 2010–14
  • Researcher, Microsoft Research, 2010–14

Awards and Honors

  • Business School Trust Faculty Scholar for 2019–20
  • GSB Trust Faculty Scholar for 2018–19
  • GSB Trust Faculty Scholar for 2017–18
  • Rising Star, Association for Psychological Science, 2015
  • Top 100 Papers that Most Caught the Public Imagination (22nd), Altmetrics, 2015
  • Open Innovation Award, Accenture, 2015
  • One of the Top 50 Most Influential People in Big Data, DataIQ and IBM, 2013
  • Top 100 Papers that Most Caught the Public Imagination (9th), Altmetrics, 2013
  • Top 100 Papers that Most Caught the Public Imagination (21st), Altmetrics, 2013

Publications

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Teaching

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Conferences, Talks & Speaking Engagements

Our Twitter Profiles, Our Selves: Predicting Personality with Twitter

Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom, 2011

The Personality of Popular Facebook Users

Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2012

Crowd IQ - Aggregating Opinions to Boost Performance

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2012

Facebook and Privacy: The Balancing Act of Personality, Gender, and Relationship Currency

Proceedings of AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2012

myPersonality project: Example of successful utilization of online social networks for large-scale social research

International Conference on Mobile Systems (MobiSys), 2012

Psychological Aspects of Social Communities

Proceedings of ASE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), 2012

Personality and Patterns of Facebook Usage

ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), 2012

Mining Facebook Data for Predictive Personality Modeling

Proceedings of AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013

Relating Personality Types with User Preferences in Multiple Entertainment Domains

Multiple Entertainment Domains In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Emotions and Personality in Personalized Services (EMPIRE), 2013

Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition

Proceedings of AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013

Inferring the Demographics of Search Users

Proceedings of ACM International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2013

Toward Personality Insights from Language Exploration in Social Media

AAAI Spring Symposium: Analyzing Microtext, 2013

How are you doing? Emotions and Personality in Facebook

Proceedings of 22nd International Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP), 2014

Stanford GSB Affiliations

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