Hi! My name is Marijn
I’m a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, University of Toulouse 1 Capitole, in France (IAST).
My main research interests are in computational social science and complexity science. Specifically, theoretical and empirical modeling of online behavior and 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. Currently, I am working on the effects of network embeddedness, environmental bias and politicization of decision making on the emergence of polarization.
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, I was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Sociology and Computational Social Science in the Karslruhe Institute of Technology.
Updates
December 2022 \\ A high socioeconomic status converts
to hard cash for sellers on peer2peer market places. With Rense Corten, I tested the
positive link between SES and trust – hypothesized by James Coleman a
lifetime ago. In a vignette experiment, we asked respondents which of a
set of sellers they preferred, and consistently, they chose to buy from
high status sellers. Even when the high SES seller offered the product
at a higher price. The study has interesting real-world implications.
The profiles that peer to peer marketplaces use all the time might
contain information that amplifies existing inequalities between users.
Seemingly small decisions on what to contain in those profiles matter.
The paper Socioeconomic status,
reputation, and interpersonal trust in peer-to-peer markets: Evidence
from an online experiment is published, open access, in Rationality
& Society—A journal founded by… James Coleman
March 2022 \\ Do filter bubbles cause
polarization? In our new paper in the next issue of Data
Science Michael Mäs and I argue that the answer to this question
depends on a multitude of factors on the global, local and individual
level of online social media as complex systems. We provide an extensive
review of theoretical and emprical work and show with toy models how
counter-intuitive effects emerge from of seemingly straightforward
mechanisms. We argue for the use of digital ‘crash-test dummies’ to
optimize technological innovations for information systems
pre-implementation.
Website was last updated on January 09, 2023