Madison Singell

Photo of Madison Singell
PhD Student, Organizational Behavior
PhD Program Office Graduate School of Business Stanford University 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305

Madison Singell

Hi, I’m Madison! I’m a PhD Candidate in Macro Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. My research explores how the way we understand the world and tell stories about it impacts our ability to organize well.

I’m a computational and mathematical modeler, and I also use natural language processing and other computational methods to identify understandings and narratives in text data. Prior to graduate school, I received my bachelor’s degree in Economics from Harvard and spent several years working in consulting, technology, and people analytics research.

Research Statement

Causal understandings, such as causal narratives, are a key way humans convey meaning and negotiate interpretations. In organizations, in order to decide what to do next, it’s important stakeholders agree about what happened. But employees often don’t agree and struggle to reach convergence in understandings, even in a shared context like an organization. I study how the nature of the world, our experiences, and our culture impacts the understandings we form, in order to understand how organizations who are seeking to form convergent strategies can better navigate the pitfalls of divergent understandings.

Research Interests

  • Causal Inference
  • Narratives
  • Computational Social Science
  • Strategy

Publications

Goldberg, Amir and Madison Singell. Annual Review of Sociology

DeFilippis, Evan, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer, and Raffaella Sadun. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Working Papers

Organizational Applications of the Ising Model

Singell, Madison.

Does Collective Mental Time Travel Improve the Performance of New Self-Managed Teams?: Evidence from a Startup Competition

Singell, Madison, Andrea Freund, Lindred Greer, Hayagreeva Rao, and Magaret Neale.

When Meetings Multiply: The Consequences of Collaboration Overload.

Polzer, Jeff, Evan DeFilippis, and Madison Singell.

Work in Progress

On the Theory of Narratives

Singell, Madison and Amir Goldberg.

BERT and Cultural Representations of Meaning.

Atwell, Jon, and Madison Singell.

It’s a Numbers Game: How Bayesian Updating Perpetuates Biased Outcomes and Gender-Dependent Noise in Promotion Markets.

Singell, Madison.