Abstract: For decades, physical behavioral labs have been a primary, yet limited, method for controlled experimental studies of human behavior. Now, software-based “virtual labs” on the Internet allow for studies of increasing complexity, size, and scope. In this talk, I highlight the potential of virtual lab experiments for studying social interaction and coordination. First, we explore collective intelligence and digital teamwork in “crisis mapping”, where digital volunteers organize to assess and pinpoint damage in the aftermath of humanitarian crises. By simulating a crisis mapping scenario to study self-organization in teams of varying size, and find a trade off between individual effort in small groups and collective coordination in larger teams. We also conduct a study of cooperation in a social dilemma over a month of real time, using crowdsourcing participants to overcome the time constraints of behavioral labs. Our study of about 100 participants over 20 consecutive weekdays finds that a group of resilient altruists sustain a high level of cooperation across the entire population. Together, our work motivates the potential of controlled, highly instrumented studies of social interaction; the importance of behavioral experiments on longer timescales; and how open-source software both can speed up the iteration and improve the reproducibility of experimental work. (based on joint work with Lili Dworkin, Winter Mason, Siddharth Suri, and Duncan Watts)

Explore Andrew’s work:  “An Experimental Study of Team Size and Performance on a Complex Task” and “Resilient Cooperators Stabilize Long-Run Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma”

Bio: Andrew Mao is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Computational Social Science at Microsoft Research in NYC. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015. His research focuses on studying collective intelligence and social interaction on the Internet, such as teamwork in online communities and coordination in crowdsourcing systems. Andrew specializes in designing and gathering data from real-time, interactive, web-based behavioral experiments, and he is the designer of TurkServer, an open-source platform for building such experiments. He received the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award in 2011.

A buffet lunch will be available at 11:45 a.m., and the seminar will begin at 12:00 p.m.