PhD in Methodology & Statistics

Offer Description

Do you want to conduct cutting-edge research within a large ERC Synergy project addressing one of the most pressing human rights challenges worldwide?

This position offers a rare opportunity to conduct high-impact research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychological science within a large, internationally visible research programme.

Your position
This 4-year, fully-funded PhD project is part of the ERC Synergy Grant JUSTICE – Joining Unique Strategies Together for Interrogative Coercion Elimination.

The position focuses on the behavioural, cognitive, and evaluative study of human-AI interaction in the context of investigative interviewing. The PhD candidate will investigate how individuals perceive, evaluate, and respond to AI-generated interviewing strategies, how AI systems compare to human interviewers and how a “hybrid” human and artificial intelligence can advance the field. Central research questions concern information quality, perceived interview quality, trust, and human judgements of ethical interviewing behaviour.

The project involves controlled laboratory experiments as well as large-scale online behavioural studies, examining the performance of AI systems alongside trained and untrained human interviewers. The project offers substantial intellectual freedom and requires a high degree of independent problem-solving.

The PhD candidate will join the Computational Psychology and Computational Methods Lab (CPCM Lab, ), an internationally oriented research group dedicated to advancing computational approaches to understanding human behaviour. The lab integrates machine learning, generative language models, behavioural science, and statistical modelling within an intellectually ambitious and methodologically rigorous research environment. Embedding within the CPCM Lab provides an excellent foundation for an academic career or a career in the AI industry, with opportunities for international collaboration and research internships.

The project will be supervised by Dr. Bennett Kleinberg.

• Design and run behavioural experiments
• Study human-AI interaction and evaluation processes
• Analyse behavioural, linguistic, and decision-making data
• Develop evaluation frameworks and datasets
• Publish in international peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings
• Present at leading conferences
• Contribute to Open Science and collaborative research
• Participate actively in the JUSTICE project
• Participate in the CPCM Lab and the Department of Methodology & Statistics
• Contribute modestly to teaching (max. 10%)

Large language models are transforming how we study language, human cognition, and decision-making. Yet how humans perceive, evaluate, and interact with AI systems in ethically sensitive, high‑stakes contexts remains poorly understood. Investigative interviewing provides a uniquely demanding setting to examine human judgements, trust, and behavioural responses to AI‑generated conversational strategies. The project explores how individuals evaluate AI and human interviewers, how AI systems influence decision‑making processes, and how human feedback shapes AI behaviour (and vice versa) – a challenge at the frontier of behavioural science and artificial intelligence.

JUSTICE (Joining Unique Strategies Together for Interrogative Coercion Elimination) is a major ERC Synergy project funded for six years with more than EUR 10m. The project addresses one of the most pressing challenges in global justice systems: the persistence of coercive and abusive interrogation practices. By integrating artificial intelligence, data science, psychology, neuroscience, criminal law, and policing research, JUSTICE develops evidence‑based strategies for ethical, human‑rights‑compliant investigative interviewing and establishes a new scientific frontier at the intersection of human decision‑making and AI.

The project is led by four principal investigators:
Bennett Kleinberg (Tilburg University), Shane O’Mara (Trinity College Dublin), Yvonne Daly (Dublin City University), and Dave Walsh (De Montfort University). Researchers hired within JUSTICE benefit from…