Events

Understanding social group memberships from short texts

Social groups are part of our everyday life, from small lab groups to large-scale political groupings. However, we still know relatively little about the way we psychologically become group members or leave groups, and how we navigate between the different sets of social norms and values that define the various groups we are part of.

Event details

One reason for this may be that it is difficult to assess which group membership is active in a person’s mind within a specific situation, and to assess changes in group membership over longer periods of time. Using very basic natural language processing and machine learning analyses, we created the ASIA (Automated Social Identity Assessment) toolkit that detects which of two group memberships was active in a person’s mind while they were writing. This allows us to use online forum data and other text data to understand how we develop into new group memberships (e.g., parenthood) and leave unwanted ones behind us (e.g., being an addict). It has also provided important insights into the way we navigate between different group memberships (social identity switching), and the extent to which a combination of group memberships (hybrid identities) can help extremist groups such as eco-fascists to infiltrate moderate groups online. Finally, when using a combination of ASIA and multi-dimensional scaling, we can learn more about a group’s type and values, and how it has developed over time, such as the journey from stigmatised to collective action group that the Reddit forum r/transgender has been on in the last 10 years. In this talk, Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis will give an overview of the method and present example studies from (mental) health and policing/security to illustrate the various uses of the toolkit along with a discussion of the challenges that still need to be addressed.


Miriam Koschate-Reis is an Associate Professor for Computational Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Exeter. Her research combines traditional psychological methods with computational social science techniques to better understand social group memberships. She is a former EPSRC Innovation Fellow and has received funding from EPSRC, MRC, NIHR, ESRC, and CREST to study group memberships in the contexts of (mental) health, security, and technology.

This seminar will take place in the Clayden Building - please note space is extremely limited in the Clayden meeting room. If you would like to attend remotely please email C2S2@exeter.ac.uk.