Stanford sociology professor Robb Willer is one of five Stanford winners of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, alongside economics professor Ran Abramitzky, history professor Joel Cabrita, anthropology professor Angela Garcia and anesthesiology professor Sheng Xu.

Willer received his Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from Cornell University and his B.A. in sociology from the University of Iowa. He previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley. At Stanford, he directs the Politics and Social Change La, the AI for Public Benefit Lab and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

His research focuses on the social forces that bring people together, such as morality and altruism, and forces that divide them, such as fear and prejudice. The primary area of research looks at the social and psychological forces shaping Americans’ political attitudes, and techniques for overcoming polarization to build political consensus.

In 2021, he co-led the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a megastudy evaluating 25 interventions to reduce anti-democratic attitudes. The study found that effective interventions decrease partisan animosity by highlighting relatable individuals with different political beliefs or emphasizing common identities. It also identified how correcting misperceptions of opposing views reduced the support for undemocratic practices

This year, he also published a piece in Nature arguing that every social science should improve replicability in its research.

Chosen from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

Willer wrote to The Daily about the fellowship, political coalition formation, the replicability of social science and his advice for students.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): What project will the Guggenheim support, and what are you most excited to pursue during the fellowship year?

Robb Willer (RW): I expect to use the time to step back from shorter article-scale projects and develop a longer-form line of work on political coalition formation: when and how groups come to recognize shared interests, build alliances across differences, and sustain collective projects over time. The work is connected to my broader interests in democracy, collective action and social change, but it is not specifically an AI project, nor a direct continuation of my earlier work on polarization.

One of the things I’m especially excited about is the opportunity the fellowship provides for synthesis. It creates time to think across approaches to collective action and ideological diversity from sociology, social psychology and political science.

TSD: What draws you to coalition formation specifically at this moment?

RW: I’m drawn to the study of political coalitions because many of the most important social and political projects depend on cooperation among people and groups who share some goals but not all of their values, identities, or theories of change. Much of my research has studied these issues through the lens of left-right polarization in the U.S., but some of the most consequential coalition challenges occur within ideological camps. On the American left, for example, different factions often share commitments to social change while disagreeing about strategy, priorities, and the boundaries of their coalition. I find those questions really interesting because they sit at the intersection of collective action, identity, morality and political institutions. Whether one views those internal divisions as good or bad likely depends in part on one’s political commitments, but they clearly shape the possibilities for social change.

TSD: You published a piece in Nature this year arguing that every social science should improve replicability. What prompted you to write it, and is it connected to how you think about the design of your own research?

RW: I was fortunate to be invited to comment on Nature’s recent publications from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project. I wrote what I did because I believe much of the social sciences have made real progress in improving research practices, but that this progress remains incomplete. I think every social science benefits from strong norms around transparency, replication, preregistration — where appropriate — open access to data and materials and careful attention to statistical power and research design. That perspective is closely connected to how I think about my own research program.

Many of the questions I study are socially and politically consequential, which makes it especially important to be clear about what the evidence shows, what it does not show and how confident we should be in the findings. I think that sometimes people think of researchers with strong normative motivations as also less methodologically rigorous. I’m not sure if that’s the case on the whole or not. But speaking for myself, when a project can speak to or even impact others’ welfare, that makes it all the more important to be rigorous, careful and to scrutinize the possibility of bias entering my analysis.

TSD: What advice do you have for Stanford students interested in empirical social science and applied research on democracy?

RW: My main advice would be to pair ambitious questions with disciplined research designs. Strong empirical work requires methodological training, but it also requires close attention to real institutions, organizations and communities. The most valuable projects often come from taking socially important problems seriously while being rigorous about what the evidence can and cannot show.