Purdue Political Science Welcomes Professor Lisa Argyle

The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Lisa Argyle has joined Purdue as Associate Professor of Political Science. Argyle’s research sits at the intersection of computational social science and political behavior. She is particularly interested in how people talk about politics—in everyday settings as well as online—and how advanced models and experiments can deepen our understanding of persuasion, polarization, and political participation. She has focused much of her work on exploring how large language models (LLMs) can advance social science inference and democratic practice.

Her recent publications illustrate both the range and the innovation of her work. In “Leveraging AI for democratic discourse: Chat interventions can improve online political conversations at scale,” (2025 PNAS), Argyle and coauthors show that tailored chat-based interventions can enhance people’s respect or tolerance for people they disagree with—even on divisive topics—without shifting political views. In “Arti-‘fickle’ Intelligence: Using LLMs as a Tool for Inference in the Political and Social Sciences,” (2025 Nature Computational Science) her team offers a framework for responsibly using generative models in research, emphasizing validation, transparency, and the limits of inference. Her new work “Testing theories of political persuasion using AI” (2025 PNAS) applies LLMs directly in experiments to probe mechanisms of influence.

In new work, she and a team of scholars are working on a project that engages people in phone conversations with a very realistic-sounding AI agent. “We randomly assigned the gender of the voice of the AI agent to examine gender biases in political persuasion. I am really excited about the advances in technology that make totally new approaches to longstanding research questions possible.”

Professor Argyle also contributes to major survey infrastructure: she is an Associate co-Principal Investigator for the Cooperative Election Study (CES), one of the field’s largest projects for examining American public opinion and behavior.

Before coming to Purdue, she held a postdoctoral position at Princeton University and served on the faculty at Brigham Young University, where she earned a reputation for rigorous interdisciplinary work and her mentorship of students. She notes that she loves the fresh perspectives and enthusiasm that students bring to research projects: “I love helping them think through the process of taking the big questions in the real world that motivate them and figuring out how to design a project that really lets them create new knowledge as they try to answer those big questions.” She is especially enjoying teaching PhD students about political behavior this semester.

The Department is excited to welcome Professor Argyle to Purdue’s research and teaching community. Her work promises to enrich the department’s strengths in computational methods, political behavior, and the evolving landscape of AI and democracy.