The aim of this project is to analyse the role of individual action and decision-making in situations in which groups are being nudged to behave in a desired way. The psychology of social systems postdoctoral project will develop insights from existing psychological theories on the often complex interplay between individuals and the social systems to which they belong to understand the phenomenon of crowd nudging and to improve socially responsible nudging of crowds.
The psychology of social systems postdoctoral researcher will closely work together with one postdoctoral researcher in ethics, one in social physics, and other researchers in the three disciplines. She/he will bring a psychology of systems perspective 'into the mix' being sensitive to the two other disciplines in three steps. The psychology postdoctoral research will develop a conceptual model for describing the relationship between the individual and the crowd, taking into account existing conceptualizations and theories in psychology, perform empirical justifications for the system model by testing various models against substantive data containing movement trajectories of individuals, and will inform the development, and empirical testing of interventions (e.g., nudges) aimed at optimizing crowd flows in train stations.
Parallel with the research, you will be part of the Physics of Social Systems learning line (three courses totalling 15 ECTS) in which students work on similar topics following an innovative
challenge-based learning approach. The student work is expected to be input to the postdoc's research. The education percentage is negotiable, but expected around 25%.
SRCrowd Project. The psychology postdoctoral-project is part of the interdisciplinary SRCrowd research project.
The SRCrowd research project will analyse the different roles individual and collective agency play when crowds in train stations are nudged towards more responsible behaviour. The project will involve social physicists, psychologists, and system philosophers. The social physicists have already set up innovative multi-scale crowd dynamics measurements that enable individual, high-accuracy, dynamic pedestrian tracking. Psychologists will start from the individual's angle and philosophers will start from the system angle to describe together crowd phenomenon. The overall project will consist of developing the necessary conceptualizations, modelling the crowd phenomenon and performing and studying the effects of nudging individuals/crowds towards responsibility in an ethically acceptable way.