Eric Gladstone
Behavioral and computational scientist
I study how information is distributed, interpreted, and transformed through networks, and how communication structure shapes judgment, coordination, and collective behavior across human, organizational, and AI systems.
My work combines experiments, network analysis, measurement, simulation, statistical inference, and computational systems to make difficult-to-observe processes more measurable, manipulable, and testable.
Current research
Four lines of work, each with manuscripts under review or forthcoming.
Machine-agent networks
How communication structure, what agents are permitted to share, and the composition of models across positions shape collective reasoning in networks of machine agents.
Information transformation and provenance
How information changes as it moves through a communication system, and what can be inferred about a hidden production process from the traces that remain observable.
Simulation and mechanism
Models that separate mechanisms capable of producing similar visible outcomes: latent diffusion before adoption, correction during adaptive search, and cue-mediated residential sorting.
Measurement of cultural structure
Methods for distinguishing recurrent structure across a transformation lineage from surface resemblance, and for validating a candidate signature on held-out material.
Systems
Some research questions require building the environment in which the process can be observed.
I build controlled multi-agent environments, simulations, communication-trace inference systems, analytical pipelines, and research software when existing data or tools cannot expose the relevant process directly. These systems make communication structure, information access, routing, model capability, and other conditions manipulable, or test what can be recovered when the underlying process is only partially observed.
Applied work
I have spent much of my career in settings where research questions arrive underspecified, measurement is imperfect, populations are heterogeneous, and decisions must be made before every source of uncertainty can be resolved.
Across technology, public health, media, organizational research, public affairs, and commissioned work, I have designed experiments and measurement systems, analyzed behavioral and relational data, evaluated products, interfaces, and research prototypes, built research infrastructure, and translated evidence into decisions while keeping the limits of the design explicit.