Opinion Change Modeling and Measurement

Catalog description

Opinions can decide whether societies achieve sustainable outcomes or not. Modern online echo chambers can amplify climate denial extremism, for example. Polarized institutions are not as responsive to climate change threats and rolling disasters. This course provides students a scientific framework to understand how social influence changes opinions, drawing on cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, and network science. Students will design empirically motivated simulations of social interventions to reduce extremism or polarization in a population, for example. Students will also learn statistical techniques to reliably measure opinion change. Students will write their own models and analyses in the R programming language using the socmod library (https://css4s.github.io/socmod/), developed by the Instructor for education and research. Students will develop computational analyses that evaluate candidate social influence interventions to promote sustainable outcomes, culminating in a journal article-style final paper. Students will gain transferable skills in technical writing, project development, computer programming, and other general computational techniques.