Dynamics of polarization

Olivia Chu, a Neukom Fellow in the Departments of Mathematics and Sociology at Dartmouth College, will be discussing and answering questions on Dynamics of Spatial Polarization during the virtual event, Dynamics of Polarization - CounterBalance X.

Excerpt from the event:

CounterBalance is the Santa Fe Institute's applied seminar series on belief dynamics, focusing on issues such as cyberhate, misinformation, disinformation, and social polarization. The intention of these meetings is two-fold. First, these seminars provide a clearinghouse for practitioners, policy makers, and scholarly researchers to share and discuss new insights. Second, these seminars provide an opportunity to contextualize these insights within the broader understanding of complexity science. 

The tenth session in our series will focus on polarization. Extreme polarization is a dangerous phenomenon that requires greater scientific attention to address effectively. In particular, polarization can hinder social coordination. By viewing political systems as complex adaptive systems, we can deepen our understanding of the dynamics of political polarization and related trends. This meeting, based on last month's special feature in PNAS, will feature presentations by Simon Levin and Olivia Chu. (Other SFI-affiliated researchers contributing the PNAS special feature above include Jenna Bednar, Stephanie Forrest, and Scott Page.)

In Spring 2022, Oliva will be teaching a course cross-listed between the Program in Quantitative Social Science and the Department of Mathematics. The course is QSS 30.04/MATH 30.04 Evolutionary Game Theory. About her course, Oliva states that, "I'm really excited to be teaching Evolutionary Game Theory, because it's a very interesting topic, but not a class that you would find in every place (in fact, I wasn't exposed to it until my first year of grad school). I will be building off of Feng Fu's course (I am teaching it in his place this spring) and am fortunate to be able to talk to him about his experiences with teaching it at Dartmouth." Olivia received her Ph.D. in 2021 from Princeton University in Quantitative and Computational Biology where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Oliva's research focuses on the dynamics of human behavior and the effects that different kinds of heterogeneity, e.g., in population structure, in individuals' personalities, have on these dynamics.