Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Fall 2026 seminar series) ----- September 28th 2026 12:45-2:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Social information is the currency of human culture, and it is increasingly encountered in online social networks where information flow is controlled by algorithms. In practice, this has generated a significant problem: social information encountered online is often highly unrepresentative of all the people in a given social network. Focusing on the context of politics, in this seminar the speaker argues that this problem of unrepresentativeness is best explained as an emergent phenomenon that arises when humans and social media algorithms learn from one another (‘algorithm-mediated social learning’). The seminar will present a series of experiments in the lab and in a large field experiment that find social media algorithms exploit human social learning biases toward PRestigious, Ingroup, Moral and Emotional information, or PRIME information) in ways that distort our understanding of social norms. ----- BIO: William Brady (Kellogg School of Management) is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations. His research examines the dynamics of emotion at the social network level and their consequences for group behavior. His recent work studies how human psychology and AI-mediated social contexts interact to shape our emotions and intergroup attitudes.
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