Gaël Le Mens

Gaël Le Mens is a Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and an Affiliated Professor of the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE).

Professor Le Mens studies how people, organizations, and AI systems learn from experience. A central theme of his research is that the information available to learning agents is often shaped by their own past decisions. Because people, organizations, and AI systems tend to seek out options they believe to be valuable and avoid those they believe to be poor, they may learn from self-selected and systematically biased samples of experience. As a result, learning can reinforce inaccurate beliefs rather than correct them.

His research also examines how the environments in which learning takes place—including markets, organizations, societies, technological interfaces, training datasets, and AI fine-tuning processes—shape the information agents encounter and the beliefs they form. Understanding these mechanisms can help improve the design of organizations, social systems, and AI technologies to foster more accurate beliefs and better decision-making.

His current ERC Advanced Grant project investigates how interactions with AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude shape belief formation and collective outcomes. The project examines how people come to trust responses produced by AI assistants in domains where they cannot easily verify their accuracy, how trust is influenced by the design of these systems, and how AI-assisted learning affects belief diversity, opinion convergence and polarization, and the distribution of policy attitudes.

Professor Le Mens’ research has been published in leading scientific journals, including Psychological Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science Advances, Psychological Science, Cognition, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Journal of Political Science, Sociological Science, Organization Science, Management Science, and Administrative Science Quarterly.

He has taught graduate courses at INSEAD, London Business School, ESADE, and Università della Svizzera italiana, and has given guest lectures at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Gaël Le Mens earned his PhD from Stanford School of Business.