Cognitive Science & Social Psychology Seminar ~ Sanaz Talaifar, Imperial College, London

Cognitive Science & Social Psychology Seminar

Sanaz Talaifar ~ Assistant Professor in Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College London

Title: Identity Shapes (and Is Shaped by) the Digital Environment

Abstract: People with different identities leave different behavioral traces in their digital environments. In the first part of my talk, I show how these behavioral traces can be used to deepen our understanding of the ways in which democracy is fracturing. I report results from a project that uses behavioral traces collected by smartphones to document lifestyle polarization (and its consequences) on a college campus. I then report results from a project that shows the complex ways in which behavioral traces collected from smartphones are linked with individuals' authoritarian tendencies. In the second half of my talk, I switch gears to consider not just how identity leaves traces in digital environments, but how digital environments can leave traces in identity. Here, I report results from two experiments showing that AI predictions can shape people's self-views under certain circumstances.