William Stern Award Ceremony – prof. Michał Kosiński honoured
On 15 October 2025 at 1:30 p.m., the William Stern Award Ceremony will take place in the Assembly Hall of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Wrocław.
The William Stern Award is presented by the Institute of Psychology to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the development of psychology and achieved exceptional distinction in the field. This year’s laureate is prof. Michał Kosiński, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Our guest specialises in computational social science, artificial intelligence, and psychometrics. He earned his PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he developed pioneering methods for predicting psychological traits based on digital footprints.
Professor Kosiński is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications in leading journals such as Nature Computational Science, PNAS, JPSP, and American Psychologist. He has also published the popular textbook Modern Psychometrics and contributed chapters to prestigious volumes, including the Handbook of Social Psychology. His work has been cited more than 26,000 times (h-index: 63), placing him among the top 1% of the world’s most-cited scientists.
For his scientific achievements, Professor Kosiński has received numerous awards, including the Diener Award in Personality Psychology (the most prestigious mid-career honour in the field), the Early Career Award from the Association for Research in Personality, the Distinguished Fellowship of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Early Achievement Award from the European Association of Personality Psychology, and the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science.
His research has attracted wide international attention – inspiring, among other things, a cover story in The Economist, the 2014 play Privacy, and several TED talks. It has also been featured in thousands of press articles, books, podcasts, and documentaries. More information is available at www.michalkosinski.com.
During the ceremony, Professor Michał Kosiński will deliver a lecture entitled: Emergent Properties in Large Language Models
About the lecture
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained to predict the next word in a sentence have surprised their creators by displaying emergent properties, ranging from a proclivity for biases to an ability to write computer code and solve mathematical tasks. This talk discusses the results of several studies evaluating LLMs’ performance on tasks typically used to study psychological processes in humans. Findings indicate that as LLMs increase in size and linguistic ability, they can navigate false-belief scenarios, sidestep semantic illusions, and tackle cognitive reflection tasks. This talk will explore several possible interpretations of these findings, including the intriguing possibility that LLMs do not merely model language but also psychological processes echoed in human language.
Source: Institute of Psychology UWr
Date of publication: 15.10.2025
Added by: M.K.
