PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Alexander Whitefield

Alexander Whitefield is an applied economics researcher whose AI work studies human feedback for language models. In 2023, he coauthored a WhatsApp chatbot study in South Africa and an NBER paper about market expectations around racial justice protests. He coauthored PRISM, a dataset linking participant preferences to feedback on language-model conversations; the paper won NeurIPS's 2024 Best Paper award in Datasets and Benchmarks. In 2025 he retitled a market paper Mispricing Narratives after Social Unrest; in 2026, Market Response to Racial Uprisings was accepted at the Journal of Political Economy, and his September 2026 working paper was titled Parallel Planning and Optimal Attachment. As of October 2026, he is an Applied Economics PhD student at Wharton.

Links
Website

Timeline

  1. October 2023

    ChattyCuz in South Africa

    In October 2023, he coauthors a study of ChattyCuz, a WhatsApp chatbot for young women in South Africa. He contributes data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation and visualization, with affiliations at the Behavioural Insights Team and Duke University's Department of Economics.

  2. November 2023

    Market impacts of protests

    In November 2023, he coauthors NBER Working Paper 31857 on stakeholder beliefs about the stock impacts of the 2020 racial justice protests on police-affiliated firms.

  3. April 2024

    PRISM alignment dataset

    In April 2024, he coauthors PRISM, a dataset that maps the sociodemographics and stated preferences of 1,500 participants in 75 countries to feedback on 8,011 live conversations with 21 language models.

  4. 2024

    NeurIPS Best Paper Award

    The PRISM paper wins the 2024 Best Paper award in the Datasets and Benchmarks track at NeurIPS.

  5. July 2025

    Mispricing Narratives after Social Unrest

    In July 2025, he retitles his working paper with Bocar Ba, Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Roman G. Rivera as Mispricing Narratives after Social Unrest, replacing Forecasting the Impact of Racial Uprisings, Market versus Stakeholders’ Expectations.

  6. 2026

    Market Response to Racial Uprisings

    His July 2026 draft, Market Response to Racial Uprisings, with Bocar Ba and Roman G. Rivera is accepted at the Journal of Political Economy.

  7. September 2026

    Parallel Planning and Optimal Attachment

    His working paper titled Parallel Planning and Optimal Attachment is dated September 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Applied Economics PhD student

    He is an Applied Economics PhD student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Career

  1. 2023Behavioural Insights Team
  2. 2023Duke University

Education

  1. University of PennsylvaniaPhD

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Duke University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Duke University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Duke University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Duke University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Alexander Whitefield yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Effects of digital chatbot on gender attitudes and exposure to intimate partner violence among young women in South Africa | PLOS Digital Health journals.plos.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Forecasting the Impact of Racial Uprisings, Market versus Stakeholders’ Expectations | NBER nber.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. NeurIPS 2024 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Alexander Whitefield sites.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Alexander Whitefield – Business Economics and Public Policy Department bepp.wharton.upenn.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.