Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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AGSOE: Arbeitsgruppe Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AGSOE 13: Award Ceremony: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics

AGSOE 13.2: Prize Talk

Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 17:15–17:55, HSZ 02

Using the Web to do Social Science — •Duncan J. Watts — Columbia University, New York, USA

Social science is often concerned with the emergence of collective behavior out of the interactions of large numbers of individuals; but in this regard it has long suffered from a severe measurement problem - namely that interactions between people are hard to measure, especially at scale, over time, and at the same time as observing behavior. In this talk, I will argue that the technological revolution of the Internet is beginning to lift this constraint. To illustrate, I will describe three examples of research that would have been extremely difficult, or even impossible, to perform just a decade ago: (1) using email exchange to track social networks evolving in time; (2) using a web-based experiment to study the collective consequences of social influence on decision making; and (3) using a social networking site to study the difference between perceived and actual homogeneity of attitudes among friends; and (4) using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to study the incentives underlying ``crowd sourcing''. Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, I propose that the ability to study truly ``social'' dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science.