Raluca Rilla

LIFE Fellow since 2026, MPI for Human Development

I am a doctoral researcher at the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, supervised by Prof. Dr. Iyad Rahwan. I hold a BA in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Franklin & Marshall College and an MSc in Cognitive Systems from the University of Potsdam. I study how human behavior changes as AI systems become embedded in the environments in which we make decisions and acquire scientific knowledge. Ultimately, I am interested in how sustained interaction with such systems reshapes social and ethical norms over time. My master’s thesis examined agentic AI systems’ autonomous participation in online research, showing how they can distort response distributions and contribute to misleading conclusions.

Dissertation project:

The behavioral and epistemic consequences of delegating to Artificial Intelligence systems