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Hi! My name is Marijn

I’m a Sociologist and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) & the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) in France.

I am currently working on the effects of network embeddedness, identity-bias and politicization of decision making on the emergence of polarization. Specifically, I study how pro-environmental attitudes form and how we can overcome the effects of false polarization, identity-based disagreement and belief consolidation that currently stand in the way of collective action for climate change mitigation.

My research interests lie, more generally, in understanding social influence, opinion dynamics, and political polarization. I use methods from computational social science and sociology like formal modeling, online experiments and the analysis of digital trace data. In my PhD research I focused on the impact of communicating via online social media platforms on processes of opinion formation and the diffusion of culture.

I got my PhD in Sociology from the University of Groningen where I was a member of the Norms and Networks Cluster and the ICS. Before joining the IAST-TSE, I was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Sociology and Computational Social Science in the Karslruhe Institute of Technology.

Here, you can find more about my current projects, general research interests, and publications.

Let’s get in touch!
✉️ marijn.keijzer@iast.fr

Upcoming event

Symposium on Empirically-Calibrated Agent-Based Models for Mechanism-Based Research

Agent-based simulation models (ABMs) have emerged as a central tool for theorizing about micro-macro dynamics. In parallel, the 2000s also saw the digital revolution—unleashing an unprecedented amount of data about individuals, their (inter)actions and social environments—and the popularization of analytical sociology, a branch of sociology arguing for mechanism-based explanations and a tighter link between theory and empirical research. Thus, the question about whether, and if so how, to integrate ABMs with empirical data has become increasingly pertinent. Status quo, however, is that there is relatively scarce application of empirical calibration, that there are no standardized procedures or best practices, and that there are few venues to discuss issues focused on empirical calibration. In this symposium we discuss the ways in which ABM can be used for mechanism-based research, focusing on empirical applications of such models.

Speakers

Gianluca Manzo (Sorbonne), Peter Hedström (IAS), Eva Vriens (CNR), Federico Bianchi (U Milan), Firouzeh Rosa Taghikhah (U Sydney), Lucas Sage (EUI), Marco Pangollo (Centai), Marijn Keijzer (IAST), Marion Hoffman (IAST), Martin Arvidsson (IAS), Selcan Mutgan (IAS), Silvia Leoni (Maastricht U)

Practical info

December 11, 2024 | 9.00-18.00 | Held at the Toulouse School of Economics | Online registration required