Jeff Hancock

Jeff Hancock serves as the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and holds a Senior Fellowship at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He founded and directs the Stanford Social Media Lab, leading interdisciplinary research at the intersection of communication, psychology, and technology.

Hancock's research program investigates psychological and interpersonal dynamics in digital environments through computational linguistics and experimental methodologies. Core focus areas include deception and trust mechanisms, emotional expression and contagion, relationship formation and maintenance, and online social support systems. His recent work examines user mental models of social media algorithms and ethical frameworks for computational social science research.

The Stanford Social Media Lab under Hancock's direction integrates communication theory with data science to analyze language patterns in social media, revealing insights about human behavior through large-scale linguistic analysis and controlled behavioral experiments.