Will Shulz

Hi! I'm Will Schulz. I'm a political scientist specializing in American political behavior, communication, and the application of online field experiments and other computational methods to better understand the political aspects of online platforms.

I received my PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 2024. My dissertation, "Warped Words: How Online Speech Misrepresents Opinion," was composed of a mixed-methods sequence of studies investigating why online discourse appears to be so polarized, when the majority of users hold moderate or heterodox views. In general, my research indicates that self-selection and self-censorship make online discourse appear much more polarized than users' underlying attitudes actually are.

I am a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics at New York University. Previously, I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford Social Media Lab, where I led research teams developing LLM-powered social media bots and open-source content-recommendation tools for lab-in-the-cloud experiments. Prospectively, I am broadly interested in how media technologies interact with users' motivations and attention to shape their political psychology and behaviors.