Invited lecture in the "Diving in the Digital Public Space" CIVICA course.
Please register for the event by clicking on "Registration" on the side bar on the right. The link to the talk will be sent to all registered attendees 1 hour before the talk starts. Please note that registration closes at 2:30pm on March 24.
ABSTRACT / How do conventions emerge and evolve in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as sociology, economics, cognitive science and network science. Various attempts to solve this puzzle pre-suppose that formal or informal institutions are needed to facilitate a solution. The complex systems approach, by contrast, hypotheses that such institutions are not necessary. In this talk, I will discuss theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions. Then, I will discuss how social norms change, showing how historical data and lab experiments indicate that minorities of committed individuals can trigger abrupt transitions between competing norms. Overall, these results clarify the processes of social coordination and can help identify and/or design collective behavioural change online and offline.
BIO / Andrea Baronchelli is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics of City University of London, Token Economy theme lead at The Alan Turing Institute, and Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies (CBT). His research interests include spreading phenomena on networks, the dynamics of social norms, online (mis)information and polarisation, collective behaviour change and cryptocurrency ecosystems. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Science, PNAS and Nature Human Behaviour, and has been recognized by the 2019 “Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics” of the German Physical Society.