INDEPENDENT THINK TANK
AI impacts our brains and behavior faster than common sense can comprehend.
We study that gap and empower humans.
Why the Institute exists
For most of history, changing what a large number of people believe was slow, expensive, and visible. You could see the newspaper, the pulpit, the campaign. Artificial intelligence has removed all three constraints at once. Belief can now be shaped quickly, cheaply, and without leaving a mark.
The people who build these systems understand what they do. The people affected by them mostly don't. That distance has a name in our work: the persuasion asymmetry. The Institute exists to narrow it, not by telling people what to think, but by giving them the means to see how their thinking is being acted upon.
The evidence is already unsettling. Nightingale and Farid (2022) found that AI-synthesised faces are rated as more trustworthy than real ones. When a fabricated signal outperforms a genuine one, trust stops being something earned and becomes something manufactured. We call that synthetic trust, and it is the central problem of the decade we're in.
What we do
Six arms, one purpose: understand influence, then make it legible to the people it acts on.
The Mendel Brief
Independent reporting and long-form conversation on AI, persuasion, and information integrity. The Institute's public voice.
Education
Teaching for the people who most need this literacy: policymakers, communicators, students, and the public.
Mendel Press
The publishing imprint. Books and long-form work that hold ideas at the length they deserve.
The Council
A convened group of advisors from research, policy, and practice who guide the Institute's direction.
Research
Empirical study of how belief forms under synthetic conditions, built on cross-national experimental work.
Roundtables
Small, off-the-record sessions that bring the field into the same room.
The ideas
The Institute works with a small set of defined concepts. They exist because the ordinary words for this — misinformation, manipulation, bias — are too blunt to describe what's actually happening.
The Persuasion Asymmetry. The gap between those who design influence systems and those affected by them.
Synthetic Trust. Trust produced by systems built to simulate trustworthiness rather than earn it.
Cultural Truth. What a community accepts as true because it resonates, regardless of whether it's accurate.
AI Belief Velocity. The speed at which conviction now forms, once the time between exposure and belief collapses.
Get involved
The Institute works with researchers, journalists, funders, and institutions who take this problem seriously. If that's you, there's a way in.
Awareness before belief. Belief by consent.