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The internet dominates our world and each one of us is leaving a larger digital footprint as more time passes. Those footprints are ripe for studying, experts say.
In a recently published paper, a group of Stanford sociology experts encourage other sociologists and social psychologists to focus on developing online research studies with the help of big data in order to advance the theories of social interaction and structure.
[...] In the new study, the researchers make a case for "online field experiments" that could be embedded within the structure of existing communities on the internet.
The researchers differentiate online field experiments from online lab experiments, which create a controlled online situation instead of using preexisting environments that have engaged participants.
"The internet is not just another mechanism for recruiting more subjects," Parigi said. "There is now space for what we call computational social sciences that lies at the intersection of sociology, psychology, computer science and other technical sciences, through which we can try to understand human behavior as it is shaped and illuminated by online platforms."
As part of this type of experiment, researchers would utilize online platforms to take advantage of big data and predictive algorithms. Recruiting and retaining participants for such field studies is therefore more challenging and time-consuming because of the need for a close partnership with the platforms.
But online field experiments allow researchers to gain an enhanced look at certain human behaviors that cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment, the researchers said.
For example, theories about how and why people trust each other can be better examined in the online environments, the researchers said, because the context of different complex social relationships is recorded. In laboratory experiments, researchers can only isolate the type of trust that occurs between strangers, which is called "thin" trust.
Is Big Data the path to respectability for the social sciences?
More information: Paolo Parigi et al. Online Field Experiments, Social Psychology Quarterly (2017). DOI: 10.1177/0190272516680842
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday April 05 2017, @03:51AM (1 child)
This seems to be on the track that Isaac Asimov envisioned with psychohistory in the Foundation series, which seems to be a sort of a statistical mechanics of human behaviour. In physics, statistical mechanics isn’t concerned with the behaviour of individual objects like atoms, molecules, or electrons or whatnot, but with their behaviour in aggregate, from which emerge macroscopic phenomena like pressure and temperature. In the same way the psychohistory of the Foundation series isn’t concerned with individual people, but with their behaviour in aggregate, from which emerge the phenomena of economics and politics. I don’t think it will ever be possible to accurately predict the behaviour of any one person with a great degree of accuracy, any more than it is possible to predict the position and momentum of a quantum particle, but it might be possible to predict the overall behaviour of very large numbers of particles and perhaps people too.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:36AM
Basic entities obey simple physical laws that allow us to extrapolate outwards and draw far grander conclusions. For instance the simple observation that the speed of light is measured to be exactly the same from any perspective leads directly to the stupefying implications laid out in relativity. The great and complex is built off the simple and static. If it was discovered that the speed of light in a vacuum is indeed variable without external influence then relativity would need to be vastly reworked if not completely discarded. The complex is completely predicated upon the simple. When you introduce humans into the picture, there are no fundamental principles. Even when considered as groups there are no consistent and invariable characteristics. Even things that are at least quite common invariably come with a half dozen asterisks attached. And of course that "quite common" constantly changes over time. What this all means is that any sort of extrapolation of behavior is, by necessity, complete conjecture.