Visiting Professor: Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri

Harnessing heterogeneity in behavioural research using computational social science

Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri
Full Professor of Computational Social Science and Cognitive Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento

Tuesday, November 15 at 11:15am
SSC 5220

Abstract
Digital online platforms have extended experiments to large national and international samples, thus increasing the potential heterogeneity present in responses to the examined treatments. Therefore, identifying and studying such heterogeneity is crucial in online behavioural experiments. New analytical techniques have emerged in computational social science to achieve this goal. We will illustrate an example from a study conducted about the COVID-19 pandemic, which applies model-based recursive partitioning to data from an online experiment to increase vaccine willingness in eight European countries. Another valuable piece of information generated by this approach is identifying particular segments of the sample under investigation that might merit further investigation. Identifying ‘local’ models of the population is not just a matter of chance. When applied to independent variables involving socioeconomic and behavioural measures, this possibility/technique allows us to detect/determine subgroups characterised by a particular socioeconomic or cognitive pattern shared by that group. Such a group could very well be transversal to traditional sociodemographic categories. We will present an overview of the family of approaches derived from CART like ‘honest’ causal tree and causal forest.

Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri holds an MSc in Social Research Methods (Statistics) from the Methodology Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a PhD in Social Psychology from the LSE.  He is a Full Professor of Computational Social Science and Cognitive Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. He is the academic coordinator of the doctoral programme in Sociology. He was Senior Lecturer at the University of Leicester. He has been a Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and a scientific fellow at the European Commission JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). Before joining the IPTS, he has been a research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature,  Science Advances, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS One, Computers in Human Behavior, Public Understanding of Science, Big Data & Society, Behavioural Public Policy and others.