onlincourse

People, Networks and Neighbours: Understanding Social Dynamics

Learn why social processes seem so unpredictable and understand better the basics of social dynamics with experts from the University of Groningen.

Duration

3 weeks

Weekly study

4 hours

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How it works

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Explore a new way of approaching questions about social behaviour

This three-week course will help you understand why social processes seem so unpredictable and understand better the basics of social dynamics. It’s designed to show you a new interesting way of approaching questions about social behaviour. Throughout, you’ll focus on social mechanisms and will explore how models and simulations can help to understand those mechanisms.

Understand how micro behaviours can lead to unexpected results for a group or society

You’ll gain an understanding of how the behaviour of individuals can lead to unexpected results on a group or societal level. You’ll also explore a new way of looking at social phenomena by focussing on underlying mechanisms, and will investigate how models can help decipher social processes.

You’ll also explore how similar social processes occur across different contexts, and will experiment with a simple pen-and-paper model and a computer simulation of a social mechanism. Finally, you’ll identify the opportunities that computational social sciences (CSS), especially modelling and simulations, offer for understanding social processes.

Experiment with models and simulations - without any prior mathematical or programming skills

Throughout the course you will be investigating some simple social processes with the help of models that illustrate how humans behave and how they influence each other. For that we will use examples, animations and game-like tools - no mathematical and programming skills are required!

Week 1
Discovering social dynamics
- Why are social processes hard to predict?
  In this activity, you will consider why social processes seem so unpredictable and have a closer look at one specific process of organising a protest.
- Organising a protest - investigating a simple model
  In this activity, you will investigate a very simple model of how a protest comes to life and explore how micro behaviours lead to unexpected outcomes on a social level.
- Between micro-behaviours and social outcomes
  In this activity, you will explore how a small change can have a big impact on the final outcome and how it is important to think about mechanisms leading from individual behaviours to the results on a societal level.
- Model, modelling and simulations
  In this activity, you will learn what model, modelling and simulations are - on the basis of your experiences with the protest organisation example.
- Summary of Week 1
  We wrap up the week.
Week 2
Conformity, friends and networks
- Imitation and influence
  In this activity we will discuss why we sometimes imitate other people’s behaviour.
- Grapevine protests - how protest spreads through social relations
  In this activity, we will investigate how a protest may spread via friendship relations. We will also start looking at the way networks of relations influence our decisions.
- Social Network Analysis and the networks around us
  In this activity, we will discuss what Social Network Analysis is and explore the world of networks around us.
- Describing social dynamics
  In this activity we will focus on measuring social dynamics, we will investigate the ways that the numbers grow and find out what a nonlinear process is.
- Social dynamics and computational models
  In this activity, we will discuss why we need computational models to study complex processes and what is the added value of simulating social processes.
Week 3
Neighbours, flags and a bird’s eye view
- Protests that spread spatially
  In this activity, you will consider how sometimes protest comes in a ‘spatial’ form and consider how some processes may spread via neighbour-to-neighbour influence.
- Protests in Cherryville
  In this activity, you will investigate a model of a process that spreads in space and we will focus on the process of creating this model, both by looking at individuals and their surroundings.
- Spatial protests seen from a bird’s eye view
  In this activity, you will explore the model further, this time on a bigger scale and you will see the results of the process from a bird’s eye view.
- Simulating the spread of the protest in different cities
  In this activity, you will experiment with different cities with the help of a simple simulation tool (no need to install anything!) and you will observe how protests spread depending on different initial conditions.
- Combining the number of initiators and level of threshold.
  In this activity, you will first investigate how both the number of initiators and the average threshold level impact the final patterns and afterwards we will sum up the results of all experiments.
- Agent-Based Models
  In this activity, you will learn about agent-based models (ABMs) - on the basis of spatial protest simulations - and explore some real-life applications of those models.
- Finishing the course
  You have reached the end of this course. Thanks for participating! In this activity, we will quickly wrap up the contents of the whole course and point to some directions on how you can study computational models further.