Women In Data Science

Karolina Urbanska | Using data science to study human behavior

Informações:

Synopsis

As a quantitative social psychologist, Karolina has always been interested in using data to measure human behavior to try to understand it better. She has researched questions around political attitudes and polarization, particularly in light of Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016. She wanted to understand how people could arrive at completely different understandings of the world and reflect it in their voting decisions. One of her findings was that in the American two-party political system, people tend to identify as either Republican or Democrat and are more likely to agree with statements from their identified party. People use identity cues as mental shortcuts to judge information because there’s simply too much information to decipher. She says the polarization is stronger in the US where there are just two major parties compared to other countries with more choice of multiple political parties.After her undergraduate and Ph.D. in psychology and two post-doctoral positions, Karolina decided to leave ac