Introduction to EBS 181/281: Computational Social Science for Sustainability

Social interactions, social outcomes, and social learning in social networks

Dr. Matthew A. Turner, PhD

2025-01-06

Preliminaries: course information and introductions

Course information

Please see the Syllabus and course homepage at https://mt.digital/teaching/CSS4S/.

Introductions

  • Please introduce yourself, including your major and degree program
  • One to a few words about why you are interested in sustainability
  • One to a few words about why you are interested in (computational) social science

Sustainability



Final question for the group:

  • How do you define sustainability?

Sustainability

New Oxford American Dictionary definition

Sustainability

UN Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals

Sustainability

A sustainability project at Amazon [link]

Sustainability

Another sustainability project at Amazon [link]

Social Science for Sustainability

  • Elinor Ostrom led development of social-ecological systems theory, which identified design principles to help sustain common-pool resources.
    • First woman to win a Nobel prize in economics (2009)
  • A common-pool resource is something like clean water or healthy forests; all the common-pool resources together are called the commons.

  • Select design principles (8 total; see Cox, Arnold, and Tomás (2010) reading for an overview):

    • Rules should fit local circumstances
    • Participation of all stakeholders is vital
      • Management of the commons must be organized across social and institutional scales
      • All levels of social hierarchy must be recognized and free to organize
    • Conflict resolution should be easily accessible

Social Science for Sustainability

Ostrom’s work elevated traditional, Indigenous adaptations for a changing climate (always been changing) and other sustainability challenges.

From The Nature Conservancy, “Woman Scientist Saves Mangroves and Battles Climate Change” [link]

From The Nature Conservancy, “Quiet Fire: Indigenous tribes in California and other parts of the U.S. have been rekindling the ancient art of controlled burning.” [link]

Social Science for Sustainability

Two opportunities to complement Ostrom’s socio-ecological systems program:

  1. Complementary deductive methods could predict the outcomes of candidate interventions to promote sustainability.
    • Ostrom and colleagues developed the design principles inductively, based on decades of rigorous empirical research.
  2. Cooperation is not always necessary in order to gain individual-level benefits and affect sustainability.
    • Walking, biking, or EVs instead of internal combustion engine commuting
    • Heat pumps and solar panels to reduce carbon-intensive energy generation

Computational social science

  • We use the scientific method, starting from the high school version:
    1. Hypothesize what will happen in some context based on previous observations
    2. Gather evidence to support your explanation
    3. Evaluate the hypothesis (true, false, in-between)
    4. Repeat
  • In computational social science we develop computer and mathematical models to test hypotheses before gathering data.
  • We can test some hypotheses deductively this way, or we can support hypotheses that motivate empirical studies.

The Influencer: computational social science by example

The Influencer

  • Oftentimes people will eventually adopt a behavior if they observe an “influencer”.
  • If we are designing a sustainability intervention, we may want to know how long it will take for everyone who is influenced by an influencer to adopt some behavior…

The Influencer

Let’s model how long it will take for everyone who is influenced by this influencer to adopt the behavior of commuting on bike!

Yours truly spreading the love of biking.

The influencer

Initialization: time step \(t=0\); B: biker, N: not biker

  • A vertice (dots) represents a person with a unique id
  • An edge (arrows) represents a relationship between two people
  • Edge arrows indicate the direction of information flow
  • Two simulated people interact if and only if an edge connects them

The influencer

Time step \(t > 0\)

  • The influenced begin to adopt biking over time
  • We specify the probability, \(\tau\), that an influenced person adopts biking when exposed to it by the influencer

The influencer

Time step \(t = T\)

  • In this model, everyone eventually bikes because there is no “forgetting” or “reverting” to previous behaviors.
  • The state where all become bikers is called fixation.
  • The time step \(T\) when fixation occurs is the fixation time.
  • With this model we can calculate \(T\) as a function of the number of influenced agents, \(N\), and the transmissibility of biking, \(\tau\).

Review and next steps

Review and next steps

Review

  • Computational social science complements socio-ecological systems approaches to promote sustainability
  • Example Influencer model to understand, e.g., how long an advertising campaign must run in order to affect all targeted individuals

Next steps:

  • January:
    • The effect of other social network configurations beyond influencer network, including group structure
    • Other assumptions about how learning works (add forgetting, “success-bias”, and more)
  • Beyond:
    • Consider cooperative sustainable behaviors whose benefit depends on how many people adopt a behavior (e.g., prescriptive burns)
    • Understand and predict opinion polarization and its effect on sustainability

<<<<<<< HEAD:Lectures/Jan-6-2025/index.qmd ## Wednesday 1/8: Introduce Problem Set 1 ======= ## Introduce Problem Set 1 at lab session Wednesday 1/8 >>>>>>> origin/main:Website/lectures/slides/1.qmd

  • Learn to analyze anonymized class demographic data
  • Learn to program the Influencer model
  • Problem Set #1 will be due January 29 at 11:30 AM before the start of class <<<<<<< HEAD:Lectures/Jan-6-2025/index.qmd

  • At future lectures and lab sections we will learn to program other models

At future lectures and lab sections we will learn to program other models >>>>>>> origin/main:Website/lectures/slides/1.qmd that will be included in Problem Set #1.

References

Cox, Michael, Gwen Arnold, and Sergio Villamayor Tomás. 2010. “A review of design principles for community-based natural resource management.” Ecology and Society 15 (4). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03704-150438.