Harvard University · Psychology PhD

Nykko Vitali

That’s me!

I am a second-year PhD student in Psychology at Harvard University.

My work is bi-directional. On one end, I combine behavioral experiments and computational modeling to study how people metacognitively evaluate information, intentions, and intelligence in digital environments. On the other, I am quite interested in exploring what aspects of human cognition have seeped into the weights of AI, especially LLMs, and how aligned they are with human behaviors.

Current Focus

Human-AI interaction and belief updating during uncertainty & Reasoning inconsistencies in LLMs

Selected Work

ClaudeR

R MCP integration for interactive, agent-assisted coding in RStudio. View repository

A Quantitative Comaprison of Wikipedia vs. Grokipedia

A comparative project exploring information quality and narrative framing across model-generated and encyclopedia-style content. View repository

Publication Spotlight

Lehr, S. A., Saichandran, K. S., Harmon-Jones, E., Vitali, N., & Banaji, M. R. (2025).
Kernels of selfhood: GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissonance moderated by free choice.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(20), e2501823122.
Read the paper