Scaling up individual behavior.
Research
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01
The cognitive and behavioral signatures of urban life.
Why does it feel different to live in a large city versus a small one? Scholars across disciplines point to cognitive overload, inequality, and density — but there is little empirical psychological evidence for these claims. We catalog how people psychological adapt to city living through data collection and experiments designed to test mathematical models of cities and individual psychology.
Implicit racial biases ↓ in larger US cities · Lower depression in larger US urban areas
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02
Feedback loops between individual minds and collective behavior.
The rules that describe one person's behavior rarely fully explain the behavior of many people. However when individual behavior strongly couples to emergent behavior, the consequences are enormous. We are interested in finding those cases, describing the feedback between individual minds and collective behavior, and testing its consequences. One example is implicit social cognition — we modeling how cities structure the out-group encounters that drive or reduce bias, and work to understand when and why interventions effectively reduce bias.
Political identity · COVID-19 case growth scales with city size
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03
Mathematical models of social & environmental constraints.
How do the spatial, temporal, thermal, and energetic constraints of different environments give rise to the affordances that can shape behavior? We use constrained optimization as an overarching framework incorporating limited human time and energy, ambient temperature and climate, infrastructure layout, and transport costs to predict patterns of cultural and cognitive adaptation in different human social contexts. These models are typically multiscale, integrating biological, psychological, and societal-level mechanisms.
Implicit racial biases ↓ in larger, more diverse US cities · ALBATROSS — filtration-based geometry
Selected publications
Full list →
News
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“Political identity” perspective paper out in npj Complexity.
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“Implicit racial biases ↓ in larger US cities” published in Nature Communications.
Contact
andrew.stier at chicagobooth dot edu · University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago IL 60637