Erik Kommol
Research and Teaching Assistant, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Thu, Aug 17, 2023
3:00 PM UTC
Thu, Aug 17, 2023
3:00 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
In many industrialized nations such as the US, political polarization has increased within the last decades and is linked to important behavioral outcomes such as social distancing during the Covid pandemic. Prior research indicates that polarization emerges based on complex social behavior of agents. One stream of literature showed that polarization can emerge in the co-evolution of network structure and decision-making based on homophily and social influence mechanisms, which can erode socially beneficial coordination. Building on this research stream, we develop an agent-based model employing a coordination game in dynamic networks in which agents are reinforced based on the similarity of their choices or the preferences underlying their choices. We replicate the emergence of polarization when agents observe other agents choices and show that the emergence of polarization can be mitigated if agents observe the preferences underlying other agents’ choices but not the choices themselves. Our results are robust to different proportions of learning weights in the reinforcement of preferences and edge weights. Our findings point to the importance of engaging in interactions to observe the motivations and reasons underlying other individuals’ choices to mitigate polarization.
About the speaker
Erik Kommol was born in Berlin, Germany. After his high school degree he moved to Vienna and completed his Bachelor’s and Master's degree at the University of Vienna in Psychology. During that time, Erik worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Methods of Psychology, which specialized in meta-research and reproducibility. Additionally, he worked as a psychometrician in the private sector, where he constructed personality questionnaires and cognitive ability tests for the use in HR, traffic psychology and neuropsychology.
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