Abstract

This research explores the social and psychological mechanisms of self-organized collaboration, focusing on the open, collaborative software development platform GitHub. The project team includes a sociologist (United States), a cognitive scientist (Germany), a computer scientist and a software engineer (Canada). We will provide new data-driven theoretical insights into what motivates self-organized collaborations and what determines their success. We will apply a computational model of human interaction that makes explicit predictions about online interactions in a collaborative group, based on the notion that group members hold identities that are learnable, mathematically describable, and complementary to those of other group members. The project will provide empirical validation of sociological theory and formal answers to important social science questions about collaboration. It will expose novel research questions by expanding a theoretical model of small groups to the network level.

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- Two paper awards in 2017: (1) American Sociological Association Section on Social Psychology ``Outstanding Recent Contribution in Social Psychology Paper Award''; and (2) American Sociological Association Section on Mathematical Sociology ``Outstanding Article Award''. Both awards are for the paper: Tobias Schroeder, Jesse Hoey and Kimberly B. Rogers. "Modeling dynamic identities and uncertainty in social interactions: Bayesian affect control theory". American Sociological Review 81(4): p828-855, 2016. This paper describes the theoretical basis of the Themis.Cog project. 

- Paper published: Wasif Khan and Jesse Hoey How Different Identities Affect Cooperation. Proc.of the Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, San Antonio, TX, 2017