Cursusinformatie

This seminar explores how an increasing number of contemporary sociologists are using experimental methods and tools from computational social science (CSS) as complementary approaches to developing and testing theories about human behavior, social interactions, and their collective outcomes. In the first half of the term, we will develop a perspective on how CSS techniques can be successfully deployed in social research, particularly when testing theories of socially influenced behavior prone to social dynamics and hard-to-predict collective outcomes. Agent-based modeling, digital trace data, and computational text analysis enable sociologists to analyze how large-scale properties of social systems emerge from human interaction. These tools, when applied using a theory-grounded approach, offer sociologists a chance to transcend the limitations of the dominant survey-research paradigm and address “big” sociological questions. In the seminar’s second half, we focus on laboratory, online, field, and natural experiments’ potential for testing theories with maximum internal validity. We will discuss the methodological and ethical challenges that come with using experimental methods, and we will ask how experimental methods can provide new insights and push the boundaries of sociological inquiry. In each session, important phenomena and “social problems” of our time serve as use cases, such as the diffusion of misinformation, the acceleration of collective attention cycles, collective meaning making, political polarization and the politicization of everyday issues, algorithmic biases, and the long-term consequences of social rules on human prosperity. The course’s overall objective is to encourage students to consider non-traditional analysis approaches in their own work.