Bilateral project: Interdisciplinary Bridges for the Study of Crowd Cognition in Communication in the Age of Big Data

Big data and new technologies enabled by the development of artificial intelligence systems have created new societal problems and raised new very important research questions. These changes are particularly visible in the field of social communication, where the (over)abundance of information and new information sources (as well as the algorithmisation, dataisation and platformisation of communication) have contributed to the emergence of an epistemic crisis, in which society is losing the ability to negotiate a shared perception of reality. 

In the case of the bilateral project Interdisciplinary Bridges for the Study of Crowd Cognition in Communication in the Big Data Era, which focuses on the problem of social communication in a technologically driven epistemic crisis, the project partners thus intend to address questions such as:

• What drives audiences to clickbait headlines?
• In which concrete situations are individuals (and groups) more prone to populist discourse?
• How to control and regulate the algorithmic distribution of content so that it does not encourage the emergence of problematic phenomena such as confirmation bias, filter bubbles or affective polarisation?

The aim of the bilateral project (we plan to host German researchers in Slovenia and Slovenian researchers in Germany) is also to bridge the gap between the scientific disciplines of communication studies and journalism studies on the one hand (Slovenian partner) and social psychology, cognitive science and analytical philosophy on the other (German partner). All of these discplines address the issues listed above in methodologically different ways, and we look forward to build new productive collaborations.

The Slovenian partner in the project is the Centre for Social Communication Research (head of the bilateral project Prof. Dr. Slavko Splichal) from the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Ljubljana), which researches the economic, political, social and cultural determinants and consequences of social communication in mass (and especially digital) media. The German partner in the project is the Cognition, Values, Behaviour lab of the LMU University Munich (Dr. Ophelia Deroy, Head of the bilateral project Dr. Jurgis Karpus). They form an interdisciplinary research unit that combines methods from cognitive science (philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience), evaluative and normative approaches (game theory, ethics) and behavioural science (experimental psychology).