Bill Thompson

wdt@berkeley.edu
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I am an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where I direct the Computational Cognitive Science Laboratory. You can learn more about my work in this recent essay or these representative papers: Complex cognitive algorithms preserved by selective social learning in experimental populations, People balance joint reward, fairness and complexity to develop social norms in a two-player game, Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment, Resampling reduces bias amplification in experimental social networks, Hidden Differences in Phenomenal Experience.

I am Faculty in the Department of Psychology, the Program in Cognitive Science, and Berkeley's new Masters in Computational Social Science.

My research examines human cognition from a computational perspective, combining experimental psychology with machine learning and cognitive modeling to address basic questions about human learning and reasoning. I am particularly interested in the computational problems that arise in multi-agent intelligence and the solutions that human minds and societies have discovered: language, social cognition, and cultural evolution. I am also interested in the application of cognitive science to related problems in artificial intelligence.

I am currently teaching a new graduate seminar on Social Cognition. In Spring 2024, I taught a graduate seminar on Large Language Models and Cognitive Science. In Spring 2023, I taught Online experiments for psychologists. I teach a large undergraduate class called Basic Issues in Cognition. I was incredibly fortunate to win the 2022 NOMIS and Science Magazine Young Explorer Award .

Prior to UC Berkeley, I was a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, working with Tom Griffiths. I did my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, working with Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith.