MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky has been named to the 2025 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, a high-profile honor for scholars pursuing research in the social sciences and humanities.
The fellowship is provided by The Carnegie Corp. of New York. Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science, and 25 other fellows were selected from more than 300 applicants. They will each receive stipends of $200,000 for research that seeks to understand how and why our society has become so polarized, and how we can strengthen the forces of cohesion to fortify our democracy.
“Through these fellowships Carnegie is harnessing the unrivaled brainpower of our universities to help us to understand how our society has become so polarized,” says Carnegie President Louise Richardson. “Our future grant-making will be informed by what we learn from these scholars as we seek to mitigate the pernicious effects of political polarization.”
Berinsky said he is “incredibly honored to be named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for the coming year. This fellowship will allow me to work on critical issues in the current political moment.”
During his year as a Carnegie Fellow, Berinsky will be working on a project, “Fostering an Accurate Information Ecosystem to Mitigate Polarization in the United States.”
“For a functioning democracy, it is essential that citizens share a baseline of common facts,” says Berinsky. “However, in today’s politically polarized climate, ‘alternative facts,’ and other forms of misinformation — from political rumors to conspiracy theories — distort how people see reality, and damage our social fabric.”
“I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating why individuals accept misinformation and how to counter misperceptions. But there is still a lot of work to be done. My project aims to tackle the serious problem of misinformation in the United States by bringing together existing approaches in new, more powerful combinations. I’m hoping that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.”
Berinsky has been a member of the MIT faculty since 2003. He is the author of “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Other MIT faculty who have received the Carnegie Fellowship in recent years include economists David Autor and Daron Acemoglu and political scientists Fotini Christia, Taylor Fravel, Richard Nielsen, and Charles Stewart.
