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Groundbreaking large-scale social outcomes in psychological phenomena: from measurement to interventions

Alin Coman
Princeton University, USA

April 23, 2025
11:15 AM - 1:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time 

Abstract
What binds people together in communities – from small groups such as families to large ones such as nations – is the degree to which they share memories of their past, they endorse similar beliefs, and they synchronize their emotions following group-relevant events. In this talk, I will present a research program to study how communities dynamically form these collective phenomena. Using experiments that involve conversational interactions in social networks, I will show how large-scale social outcomes (i.e., collective memories, collective beliefs, and collective emotions) emerge out of micro-level local dynamics (i.e., memory updating, belief revision, and emotion contagion). This social-interactionist approach provides a framework for not only measuring, but also intervening on collective phenomena in communities of individuals, with implications for a variety of topics: from diminishing the spread of misinformation in networks to reducing negative emotions in intergroup conflict.  

Return to the full 2024-2025 program.