S3D CSS Seminar Series: Abdullah Almaatouq

Title: Studying Collective Intelligence through Integrative Experiments
Speaker: Abdullah Almaatouq, Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management
Abstract: The dominant paradigm of experimental social and behavioral science views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. But in reality, the process of reconciling findings from many different experiments conducted in different settings happens either inefficiently or not at all. Here I outline an approach, integrative experiment design, that effectively inverts the usual sequence of social scientific reasoning, starting first with the question of generalization ("over what domain do I want my theory to apply?"), then conducting the relevant experiments and analysis, and only then interpreting the results in terms of existing (or new) theory. I will illustrate how to apply the integrative experiment design approach with an example from research on collective intelligence.
Bio: Abdullah Almaatouq is a computational social scientist and Assistant Professor at MIT. His research spans three streams: (1) studying and improving collective decision-making systems, such as teams, committees, crowds, markets, and elections; (2) examining metascientific questions to enhance research methods and practice in the social and behavioral sciences; and (3) developing research tools and infrastructure for broader use in the scientific community. Abdullah is affiliated with the MIT Center for Computational Engineering, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative, and the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He holds a PhD in Computational Science and Engineering and dual master's degrees in Media Arts and Sciences (MIT Media Lab) and Computational Science and Engineering. Prior to joining MIT, he earned his undergraduate degree from Southampton University in the UK.