Lab Meeting

For our first lab meeting of the semester, we'll hear two short talks. 

First, our post-doc Martin Lang will give a talk titled "Anxiety and Ritual Behavior: Testing the Relationship between Anxiety and Predictable Behavioral Patterns".  Here is an abstract:

"Ethnographers have long noted that rituals often occur during times of stress and anxiety such as wars, gambling, or sports. Since Malinowski’s seminal work in Trobriand Islands, it has been also argued that rituals may help reduce anxiety. Furthermore, in a parallel line of research, several scholars noted that these rituals have ‘obvious features’ that can be observed across various cultures. Together with a team of co-authors, we designed a study that manipulated anxiety and used motion-capture technology to quantify various characteristics of hand movements indicating ritualization. We found that movement repetitiveness and rigidity were predicted by an increase in heart rate, while self-perceived anxiety was a marginally significant predictor of movement redundancy. In the current presentation, I will interpret these findings in the light of an entropy model of uncertainty, in which anxiety motivates organisms to return to familiar low-entropy states in order to regain a sense of control. I will further discuss our team’s next steps that include investigating the purported anxiety-alleviation effects of predictable behavioral patterns in a laboratory and during the performance of habituated rituals in a naturalistic setting in Mauritius."

Then, we'll hear from Peter Krafft, a PhD student with Sandy Pentland and Josh Tenenbaum at MIT. Peter studies computational social science and collective intelligence. Here is Peter's description of his talk:

"Being able to copy other people's decisions and beliefs affords individuals the ability to attain far richer knowledge and culture than they could on their own, leading to the potential for highly adaptive societies, institutions, and firms.  Yet copying each other too much, or too naively, stunts collective learning---leading to groupthink and sometimes to catastrophic or tragic collective decisions.  Is copying fundamentally beneficial to the individual but detrimental, or at best neutral, for the group?   I show that a variant of a commonly conjectured mathematical model of heuristic copying behavior, which I call "social sampling", can be reinterpreted at the group level as an efficient mechanism for aggregating information that individuals obtain into rational collective beliefs. Social sampling allows individuals who have only limited access to information to act with the benefit of all the information accumulated by the group.  This analysis shows how copying behavior can actually assist in collective learning by vetting and promoting good ideas.  However social sampling is fragile.  Collective learning can easily be disrupted by manipulative actors or poorly designed interaction contexts.  I test this model using an observational dataset from an online social network of amateur investors. I will conclude with a broader discussion of other related projects and ongoing/future research direction."