Hi, I am Junsol Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago, thankfully advised by James Evans.
I'm a computational sociologist studying how people decide what to believe, whom to trust, and how the authority of knowledge shifts in the age of AI and social media. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge, political sociology, and computational methods, I investigate how the "truths" people believe in are shaped through the relationships, institutions, and technologies that surround them.
A large part of my recent work focuses on the role of AI, as it has become a central mediator in how information is produced, circulated, and consumed, and therefore in what people come to believe. I investigate how political, cultural, and social biases are represented inside large language models, and how these internal representations influence the knowledge and culture that AI circulates through society. I'm also interested in how AI systems have become "agents" that interact with humans and with one another, asking how diversity, disagreement, and debate among them can improve collective thinking. Beyond this, I study how AI can serve as a powerful new instrument for social science, one that helps us measure beliefs, attitudes, and public opinion across time and populations.
My research has appeared in Nature Communications and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as AI venues including ICLR, ICML, and EMNLP, and I was recently recognized as a Rising Star in Data Science. I have also worked as a Student Researcher on Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team. You can find my CV here.
News
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2026.08Presenting Scientific misinterpretation and information laundering in policymaking at ASA 2026, New York City.
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2026.07Presenting Reasoning models generate societies of thought at IC2S2 2026, Burlington, VT.
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2026.06Presenting Scientific misinterpretation and information laundering in policymaking at ICSSI 2026, Boulder, CO.
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2026.05Presenting Reasoning models generate societies of thought at AI for Social Science Research Methods Workshop, Yale University.
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2025.11Selected as a Rising Star in Data Science (Stanford · UChicago · UCSD).
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2025.07Started as Ph.D. Student Researcher at Google, Paradigms of Intelligence Team.
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2025.04Oral presentation (top 1.8%) at ICLR 2025: Linear representations of political ideology emerge in large language models.
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2025.01Differential impact from individual vs. collective misinformation tagging published in Nature Communications.