Interdisciplinary Contributions to Methods
The Center is decisively neither a traditional computer science department nor a traditional behavioral science department. Rather, it brings together scientists from diverse disciplines in order to shed light on the phenomena of interest (see Figure 1). In particular, CHM employs scientists from three major groups of disciplines. First, computer scientists and data scientists provide the essential technical capability to produce the computational systems the Center is interested in studying (e.g., a reinforcement learning algorithm or a fine-tuned LLM generative adversarial network) and to create technical measurement instruments (e.g., to collect social media posts from X or to scrape online discussion forums and apply natural language processing techniques to them). However, the primary objective is not to contribute to the field of computer science directly in terms of new computational tools—although this does happen on occasion. This is evident in the fact that the Center's primary publication venues are not computer science conferences and journals. The second pillar of CHM are the social (behavioral) and cognitive sciences, which provide experimental methods and the theoretical foundation for understanding how humans interact with machines. The Center thus aims to hire highly qualified quantitative behavioral scientists from fields as diverse as psychology, political science, economics, biology, sociology, and anthropology. Finally, the disciplines of physics and mathematical/statistical modeling provide an additional set of tools typically not available to the average computer scientist. This enables us to use tools from network science, dynamical systems, differential equations, and multilevel statistical modeling/Bayesian inference.
Image: MPI for Human Development
