Shaping the Machines Shaping Ourselves: New Frontiers across the Psychological Sciences, Ryan Boyd

Large language models (LLMs) have moved from novelty to infrastructure in just a few years: embedded in search, writing, education, healthcare, workplaces, and daily decision-making. As they permeate human experience, their role in daily life extends far beyond providing information; they shape attention, habits, judgments, and relationships, creating new psychological environments at scale. In this session, Boyd will argue that the key question is not whether LLMs are impressive, but how psychology can help steer what they become and what they do to us. Today’s artificial intelligence (AI) is powerful enough that it should be used both for psychological science and as a central object of psychological science: as tools that can accelerate measurement and theory testing, and as social-cognitive systems that people increasingly rely on, learn from, and form relationships with. Studying the intersection of humans and AI is not a niche topic but, rather, the study of psychology itself.