Danica Dillion studies how belief systems change over time and are shaped by emerging technologies. As part of the Collective Minds research group, she investigates how AI programs model moral values and how these models can be better aligned with people.

Danica holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Whitman College and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her doctorate, she published research on topics including perceptions of moral advice generated by large language models (LLMs), the potential for LLMs to simulate human research participants, variation in moral beliefs across social network structures, and how historical societies around the world used religion to interpret everyday events. She also co-authored a benchmark for multicultural value alignment in LLMs.

Her research methods span ethnographic analysis, text analysis, and agent-based modeling. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour and Trends in Cognitive Sciences.