Seminar Details
2014-02-18 (14.00) : Predicting opinion dynamics from social experiments on-line
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speakers :
Vande Kerckhove, Corentin
,
and
Martin, Samuel
Abstract :
To what extend is the evolution of human opinion predictable ? How do opinions evolve as a result of social interactions ?
In this talk, we present an attempt to test the consensus system (well known in the control community) as a model of real world opinion dynamics. To gather opinion dynamics data, we built an on-line experiment station. There, participants play social estimation games regarding features in images. To analyze the gathered data, we carried out model identification for several consensus models and correlated model
parameters to personality traits of individuals.
We believe our on-line station to be a promising social engineering tool to investigate human behavior. It allows for a fine tuning of the experiment settings in order to closely fit to the research question.
This project is a join work with the CRAN, the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Cambridge.