a systemic view…

Digitalization has transformed our information environments and social world, giving rise to a complex system with many-to-many interactions. Online platforms such as social media and search engines have created new degrees of freedom while also introducing new constraints, such as the algorithmic curation of content. Meanwhile, generative AI has expanded the means and scope of content production, all of which is almost constantly accessible via smartphones. These developments have changed the nature of public discourse, shifted roles and power, and are affecting democratic systems around the world. (more eloquently put by David Bowie)

In our research group, we aim to understand the mechanisms at work between technology, information, human behavior, and political developments. To this end, we employ methods ranging from natural language processing and network science over online- and field-experiments to causal inference methods and agent-based modeling.

👋 Welcome to the Computational Social Science Group

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Digital Media and Democracy

How is public discourse shaped by social networks and sorting algorithms, and how does it benefit certain rhetoric? In this research area we aim to establishing causality between such information environments and factors that are crucial for democracy, such as institutional trust, affective polarization or support for populists, which is a challenge in such complex socio-technical systems.

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Psychology of Digital Propaganda

Here, our research focuses on Digital Propaganda, which we understand as orchestrated efforts to influence the public, by personalizing and repeating messages, simplifying complex issues into narratives, and employing emotionally charged content. We ask the question of how digitalization has changed those strategies and how they influence beliefs, attitudes, and behavior.

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Text as Data

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has come a long way, and now researchers can analyze text data in ways that were impossible just a few decades ago. Social media posts, transcripts of political debates, and parliamentary speeches are now valuable data sources for studying human behavior, political discourse, and societal trends. This opens up a bunch of new questions and gives us new ways to study them.

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