Northeastern University
Sign Up
Free Event

Title: Fooling with Facts! Quantifying cognitive biases through large-scale online experimentsSpeaker: Taha YasseriLocation: 177 Huntington Avenue, 11th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02115AbstractHumans’ cognitive abilities are subject to various biases both at the individual and collective levels. Such biases can have dramatic effects on our decision making. The rise of social media, crowd-sourced information repositories, and user-based information channels have raised the concern that “fake [or biased] information” along with “filter bubbles” will further distort the perception of reality that online users gain through online media leading to ill-informed decisions in political events and beyond. The proposed research aims to study and quantify two main processes in which such biases can be induced and affect our judgments, through a series of large scale field experiments. In particular we will focus on anchoring effect, that is irrational reliance on the provided numerical information, even unrelated, when making decision.About the SpeakerTaha Yasseri is a Senior Research Fellow (Associate Professor) in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, and a Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Dr Yasseri graduated from the Department of Physics at the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2005, where he also obtained his MSc in 2006, working on localization in scale free complex networks. In 2007, he moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he completed his PhD in Complex Systems Physics in 2010. Prior to coming to Oxford, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

Event Details

0 people are interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity