Melissa Sands
Social scientist and Assistant Professor of Politics & Data Science at the London School of Economics.
🇺🇸 in 🇬🇧
- Reposted by Melissa Sands📢 Call for Hidden Papers & Data on Ingroup Favoritism in Dictator Games We look for unpublished and hard-to-access experimental studies for our meta-analysis! Inclusion criteria: no deception, adults, manipulation of group membership of dictator game recipients. All tips and data very welcome!
- Early career researchers (especially in Europe / UK, but all are welcome): Apply to present your work on the urban/rural divide (very broadly defined!) @ LSE @lseinequalities.bsky.social @lsegovernment.bsky.social
- 📣 Call for Papers: 🗓️ 23-24 April 2026 at LSE Submit full papers: forms.office.com/e/9qVWeNTK0p Please share with colleagues & early-career researchers!
- Can Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extract features of urban neighborhoods from street-view images? New with Paige Bollen (OSU) and @joehigton.bsky.social (NYU): Sometimes, but the models better recover national assessments that local ones, even w/additional prompting (which can make things worse!)
- Currently in FirstView: In “Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception,” Paige Bollen, @joehigton.bsky.social, and @msands.bsky.social test which populations Generative AI is most representative of.
- We pulled tens of thousands of open-source street view images from Detroit. We processed the images, and then sampled 85 for closer analysis. For each, we queried five LMMs (propietary and open-source) 30 times for ratings on wealth, safety (day and night), and disorder.
- Reposted by Melissa Sands🚨Job News: Postdoc positions in LSE Government Department 🚨 Apply to work with the brilliant and wonderful Carl Muller-Crepon @carlmc.bsky.social on his BORDERS ERC project at LSE @lsegovernment.bsky.social jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...
- Reposted by Melissa Sands📢 Call for Submissions UK-based early career researchers in political science, political economy & public policy: apply to our January Early Career Workshop at LSE. 🗓️ Deadline: 28 Dec 2025 🔗 forms.gle/HXU4DnBq9HmX...
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- Certainly comports w/ my personal experience
- Focusing on Sweden, this study finds that PhD students begin their programs with similar psychiatric medication use as other master’s graduates, but usage rises sharply to about 40 percent higher by the fifth year before declining after graduation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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- Reposted by Melissa SandsNew working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)
- Best consumed in it’s entirety in one sitting… like their 1998 album
- Excited to share this new project, coauthored w/ @brycejdietrich.bsky.social , a VR extension of our field experiment on racial avoidance on NYC sidewalks.
- PSA: stay👏🏼 home👏🏼when👏🏼you’re👏🏼sick If you can’t stay home, wear a mask. Lots of sickness, including covid, going around. Chances are you have a vulnerable friend, colleague, etc and may not even know it. Do it for them, if not for everyone around who doesn’t want your germs.
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- …Except for the UK, where Labour wants to discourage international students from coming here www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/b...
- Reposted by Melissa Sands📢FUND DON’T FREEZE!📢 Join researchers and academics in DC on February 19th at 12 PM to stand up for research, education, and jobs! Federal attacks on science and academia put all of our futures at risk - let’s show them we won’t back down! RSVP Here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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- Celebrate the holiday by roasting this bird (delete your Twitter account; it feels good 🎉):
- Reposted by Melissa SandsHere’s a starter pack of people doing amazing experimental work on political issues —- please send on names of people here to add go.bsky.app/VgKGKz2at://did:plc:tztooghb3nivibyba7vabcgn/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3laxq7nf6fj2k
- Reposted by Melissa Sands🎇 PhD student internships in Computational Social Science at Microsoft Research NYC 🎇 These are 12 week, in person internships with some combo of Dan Goldstein, Jake Hofman, & David Rothschild Early (January - April) start dates somewhat preferred jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...
- Reposted by Melissa Sandsgoing to create a starter pack for researchers studying in-group/out-group dynamics and leave about half the relevant people out of it
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- Need your help: I’m putting together a lecture on the use of generative AI in politics research. Please share your suggestions, especially where genAI is used in the actual research (ie, not just as a productivity tool), and working papers!
- Reposted by Melissa SandsEuroWEPS VIII is here! We'll meet in Munich on Dec 15 to discuss designs/papers with a focus on causal inference. No presentations, just constructive discussions. Early career scholars are especially welcome to apply! Submission deadline is Oct 10.
