Dr. Austin Van Loon

Biography

Austin van Loon is an Assistant Professor in Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management. His research is organized into two main agendas. The first is substantive, examining the interplay between culture, identity, and context in intergroup conflict. The second research agenda is methodological meta-theoretical, seeking to understand how tools of computational social science can be validly and effectively used to deepen theoretical understanding of social phenomena. His research primarily focuses on political polarization in the U.S., utilizing a wide variety of methods, especially online experiments, computational methods, automated text analysis, and machine learning. His work has been published in various prestigious journals, including Communications Psychology, Social Science Research, American Behavioral Scientist, EMNLP, ICWSM, PLoS Nature Human Behavior, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Research Interests

Experience