Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Ulrike Hahn
2022-2023
Home institution
University of London
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
Information and communication sciences
Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Digital Society
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Ulrike is a NIAS-Lorentz Theme Group Fellow (Social Media for Digital Democracy: Theory, Applications, Algorithms) during 2022-2023.
Ulrike Hahn first qualified as a lawyer, passing both her 1st and 2nd State Law Exam in the state of Bavaria, Germany, before taking a Masters in Cognitive Science and Natural Language at the University of Edinburgh. This was followed by a DPhil in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University on the topic of rules and similarity in categorization. On completion of her doctorate, she moved to the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick as a lecturer, moving on after two years to the School of Psychology at Cardiff University where she remained for 14 years. Since 2012 she has been in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also director of the Centre for Cognition Computation and Modelling.
Ulrike Hahn’s research interests are categorization, similarity, language and language acquisition, and, first and foremost, questions of human rationality. Her research examines human judgment, decision-making, and the rationality of everyday argument. She is presently particularly interested in the role of perceived source reliability on our beliefs, including our beliefs as parts of larger communicative social networks.
Ulrike Hahn is presently a member of the Senior Editorial Board of “Topics in Cognitive Science” and an Action Editor for Frontiers in Cognitive Science and for Frontiers in Social Psychology. She also served as an Action Editor for “Psychonomic Bulletin & Review” from 2008-2012, and as a consulting editor for Psychological Review from 2009-2010.
She has also served on the programme committee for international conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, the Conference on Experimental Pragmatics, XPrag 2011. The International Conference on Thinking, ICT 2012, 2015, and the forthcoming 1st European Conference on Argumentation, Lisbon, June 2015.
Research Project
Social Media for Digital Democracy: From simulations to behavioural data and back
The theme group’s overarching goal is the development of citizen participation and deliberation tools that foster participation and consensus. Our joint proposal breaks this task down into three components:
1) How can effective deliberation be supported when face-to-face interaction is impractical, i. e., what kinds of algorithms can successfully mediate online deliberation?
2) Research on opinion dynamics provides formal models and computational methods to design formal representations of online communication systems and to study how algorithms installed on these systems affect opinion dynamics. Designing meaningful models and calibrating their assumptions to fit the context of online social networks, however, remains an unsolved challenge
3) Experimentation connecting the efforts of 1) and 2) to empirical, behavioural data.
My individual proposal focusses on empirical component (3). It seeks to identify hallmark signature effects of both the underpinnings of algorithms and simulations of opinion dynamics in order to enable suitable empirical grounding for those endeavors. And, in a second step, it seeks to develop suitable experimental paradigms for testing directly the benefits of proposed algorithms for mediation in actual deliberative settings. Hence, the ‘problem’ addressed in my proposal is the development of a suitable (future) experimentation component, and, with that, the glue that holds different parts of the proposal together.
Research Interests:
human rationality: judgment, decision-making, and the rationality of everyday argument; social networks; language
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