Bennett Kleinberg

Bennett Kleinberg is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Data Science at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London (UK). His academic journey includes a PhD from the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and a previous position at the UCL Dawes Centre for Future Crime.

Professor Kleinberg's research revolves around the interplay between psychological research and computational methods to study human behaviour. His work addresses two key questions: How can computational methods enhance our understanding of the human mind and behaviour? And how can psychological research methods inform our understanding of computational model behaviour? His substantive research interests include deception detection and legal psychology, human resilience, and machine behaviour. In the Computational Psychology and Computational Methods (CPCM) Lab, his team collects data through psychological experiments and applies techniques from natural language processing, adversarial machine learning, and statistical modeling to better understand human behavior.

His recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate a strong interdisciplinary focus, spanning psychology, computer science, criminology, and AI research. Key trends include the application of computational methods to deception detection, analysis of large language models, and examination of human-AI interactions. His work often bridges theoretical psychological concepts with practical computational approaches, resulting in publications in high-impact journals across multiple disciplines.

• Scientific publications that use promotional language receive more citations
• Verbal deception detection enhanced through adversarial attacks
• Computational text analysis for identifying embedded lies
• Analysis of cognitive phenomena in large language models
• Applications of NLP to legal and security contexts

Professor Kleinberg actively supervises students through limited positions to ensure close mentorship quality. His teaching responsibilities include the joint BSc in Data Science and the innovative MSc programme 'AI for Psychological Research.' The Computational Psychology and Computational Methods Lab offers structured pathways for PhD students, thesis projects, and research internships (minimum 6 months), with all projects required to align with the lab's core focus on computational methods to study human behavior and psychology.