On October 9th, we are lucky to have Pantelis Pipergias Analytis visiting the group. Pantelis recently moved as an assistant professor at the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies (D-IAS) at the University of Southern Denmark.
Before moving to Denmark, he spent the past two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer and Information Science department at Cornell University. Pantelis got his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Pantelis will give a talk based on his recent Nature Human Behavior paper Social learning strategies for matters of taste
- Date: October 9th
- Time: 13:30
- Place: Technical University of Denmark, Building 321, Room 134
Title: Social learning strategies for matters of taste
Abstract: Most choices people make are about ‘matters of taste’, on which there is no universal, objective truth. Nevertheless, people can learn from the experiences of individuals with similar tastes who have already evaluated the available options—a poten- tial harnessed by recommender systems. We mapped recommender system algorithms to models of human judgement and decision-making about ‘matters of fact’ and recast the latter as social learning strategies for matters of taste. Using computer simulations on a large-scale, empirical dataset, we studied how people could leverage the experiences of others to make better decisions. Our simulations showed that experienced individuals can benefit from relying mostly on the opinions of seemingly similar people; by contrast, inexperienced individuals cannot reliably estimate similarity and are better off picking the main- stream option despite differences in taste. Crucially, the level of experience beyond which people should switch to similarity- heavy strategies varies substantially across individuals and depends on how mainstream (or alternative) an individual’s tastes are and the level of dispersion in taste similarity with the other people in the group.
sune lehmann 