Harvard University · Psychology PhD
Nykko Vitali
Computational social scientist studying how people metacognitively evaluate information, intentions, and intelligence in digital environments.
I am a second-year PhD student in Psychology at Harvard University. My work combines behavioral experiments, natural language processing, and computational modeling to study social cognition, cognitive immunity, and human-AI interaction.
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
interaction-study
Web experiment infrastructure for studying perceived humanness in conversational settings. View repository
ai-turing-test
Behavioral experiment platform for human-AI conversational judgment and Turing-style evaluation. View repository
grokipediavswikipedia
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