Minahil Malik

Political science

Main research and teaching areas

• AI safety & politics; disinformation and psychological defence
• Computational social science, statistical modelling, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning
• Political psychology, moral psychology & political communication

Current research and teaching

Minahil Malik is a doctoral student in Political Science at Lund University. Her research interests focus on how AI can facilitate the spread of disinformation, polarisation, and the resulting challenges for democracy.

Through computational experiments, she investigates AI "sycophancy"—the tendency for AI models to mirror their users—and examines how this behaviour affects moral framing, persuasion, and democratic deliberation.

Her other project, in collaboration with Professor Hanna Bäck, investigates moralising language in Swedish parliamentary discourse. They implement a scalable asynchronous processing framework utilising OpenAI's API infrastructure, where large language models with chain-of-thought prompting systematically classify moral frames across over three million parliamentary speeches. She also supports training in computational methods for social scientists (text analysis and LLM evaluation).

Publications

Mulinari, S., Malik, M., Larkin, J., Elsharkawy, M., Fahey, T., Moriarty, F., & Ozieranski, P. (2025). Pharmaceutical company promotional payments to English general practices: longitudinal study. BJGP Open. doi:10.3399/BJGPO.2024.0281. BJGP Open (early view)

Malik, M. (2024). Deliberation in the Age of Deception: Measuring Sycophancy in Large Language Models. Master’s thesis, Graduate School, Lund University. Supervisor: Robert Klemmensen. LUP record / PDF. Lund University Publications+1