Hunter Priniski, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA

The early internet promised to connect the world. While humans are more psychologically, socially, and digitally connected than ever before, we sense our communications and social ties fragmenting. Why does the promise of frictionless technology increase the friction between minds, groups, and narratives? I aim to answer this question through experimental research, community narrative interventions, and local-first AI development.

I apply my training in experimental cognitive psychology and data science to research how human-AI groups express narrative agency. Narrative agency is how groups of individuals use narratives and communicative technologies to align their thinking and behaviors to affect change in the world. Specifically, I run experiments on networked groups of humans, AI agents, and hybrid combinations to understand how narrative agency is expressed through locally-rational social decision processes, language, and causal reasoning. Agent and network-level interventions allow me to test how cognitive processes interact with a group's network structure to affect which narrative content groups align on.

To sharpen the cognitive representations I study, I apply and refine AI language embedding methods to computationally align the narrative content of human and AI communications. I translate these techniques and findings into practice by creating ephemeral narrative installations that establish common ground by visualizing the alignment between diverse personal narratives.

Below are selected research projects highlighting my data science methods, experiments, and theoretical work. This Python notebook on measuring narrative alignment demonstrates the core methodology. Visit the Research Portfolio for additional themes. Full publications on Google Scholar. Reach out: priniski@ucla.edu