ARO MURI: Evolution of Cultural Norms and Dynamics of

Socio-Political Change

Ali JadbabaieUniversity of Pennsylvania

W911NF-12-1-0509

The Team

Ali Jadbabaie (PI) Michael Kearns Daron Acemoglu Asu Ozdaglar Munzer Dahleh Fotini Christia

Matt Jackson Jure LeskovecJeff Shamma

University of Pennsylvania

Stanford University Georgia Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jon Kleinberg Larry Blume

Cornell University

Motivation and Overview• Goal: create a research program that leads to understanding of social norms,

political change, cultural dynamics, societal stability with a multi-dicsiplinary lens involving network science, systems theory, dynamics, Economics, Political Economy, Computer Science

• Many of the central questions involve interactions among individuals and groups with different identities– Study of collective phenomena and collective decision making in networked setting

with domain specific knowledge– Need more quantitative approaches, beyond descriptive

• Need theory, principled modeling, data analysis, lab experiments, and field surveys

• Need to educate a new breed of computational social scientists and engineers

Why us?• Our team literally wrote the book on the topic

Meme tracker

How Does it all come together?

Network Science

Economics/Political Economy

Systems Theory

Computer Science

Experiments/Field studies

Jackson [S1,S2]Social and economic networks, evolution of social norms

Theory DataAnalysis

Modeling LabExperiments Real-World

Surveys• First principles• Rigorous math• Algorithms• Proofs

• Analysis of social network data

• computational• Social science

• Stylized, Controlled• Clean, real-world

data

• Extremely challenging!• Randomized, large scale

studies

Jadbabaie [S2,M2]Collective behavior, social aggregation, dynamics of cascades

Acemoglu[S1,P2]Dynamics of sociopolitical change, learning

Leskovec [M2,P2]Social networks data and experiments

Shamma [C1,C2]Learning in games, robustness, evolutionary dynamics

Behavioral Experiments,contagion

Kearns[M2,P4]

Blume [S3, M1]Econometrics of social networks, Emergence of trust

Christia [P2,P3]Field studies, large randomized surveysfrom conflict zones

Dahleh [C1,C2]Control, Decision making, Global networked games

• Economics• Political Science• Empirical data• How to deal

with “no physics”

Kleinberg[M1,P2] Networks, games algorithms, Modeling cascades

Ozdaglar[M2,M3]Game Theory, Networks, Cascades

Agenda for the day09:00-09:30 Modeling and analysis of cascades and contagion Jon Kleinberg, Cornell [M2]09:30-10:00 Evolutionary games and identification and modeling of social interaction Larry Blume, Cornell [S3,M1]10:00-10:30 Networked global games Munzer Dahleh, MIT [C2]10:30-11:00 Coffee Break11:00-11:30 Evolution of Social Norms Matt Jackson, Stanford [S1]11:30-12:00 Field Experiments: Role of post-conflict development Fotini Christia, MIT [P2]

12:00-12:30 Empirical study of Social Interactions: Twitter data Jure Leskovec, Stanford [P3] 12:30-1:30   Lunch (served in Levine 307) 

1:30- 2:00   Political Change, Societal stability and emergence of democracies, Daron Acemoglu, MIT [P1] 2:00-2:30 Fluctuations, Systemic risk and cascades in networks Asu Ozdaglar, MIT [M3] 2:30-3:00 Competitive Contagion and Behavioral experiments Michael Kearns, Penn [P4,M2] 3:00-3:30 Coffee Break

3:30-04:00   Influencing Social Evolutionary Dynamics Jeff Shamma, GeorgiaTech [C1] 4:00-4:30 Social Learning and belief aggregation Ali Jadbabaie, Penn [S2] 04:30-5:30   Discussion and Feedback