A cognitively grounded approach to emergent phenomena in social networks
Advances in neuroscience have resulted in meaningful contributions to understanding psychological phenomena, including an improved understanding of the operation of the cognitive system and the resolution of longstanding theoretical disputes. This improved understanding, should, in theory, lead to breakthroughs at a higher order of organization: communities of interacting minds/brains. In this talk, I will build on these advances to show how communities of individuals dynamically form collective phenomena. Using experiments that involve conversational interactions in social networks, I elucidate how large-scale social outcomes (i.e., collective memories, collective beliefs, and collective emotions) emerge out of micro-level local dynamics (i.e., memory updating, belief revision, and emotion contagion). This social-interactionist approach provides a framework for not only measuring and describing collective phenomena, but also intervening in communities of individuals, with implications for a variety of current topics: from diminishing the spread of misinformation in social networks to reducing negative emotions in intergroup conflict.
Invited speaker: Dr Alin Coman, Princeton University (https://psychology.princeton.edu/people/alin-coman)
Date: 29/04/2024
Time: 12h
Place: Sala de Graus (Siguan), Faculty of Psychology, Campus Mundet UB