Joe Bak-Coleman

Joe is a postdoctoral scholar the the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, advised by Iain Couzin and Daniel Rubenstein. His research is focused on understanding how individual decision-making gives rise to broader patterns of collective behavior. Of particular interest to him is the impact of emerging technology on social processes. Historically he has investigated multi-sensory integration and collective behavior in fish schools, but is now focused on understanding human behavioral dynamics. His ongoing projects involve the impact of polarization and partisanship on collective wisdom, statistical inference in social systems, and how incentives impact collective decision-making. To accomplish this, he relies on insight from the study of animal behavior as well as online experiments, Bayesian Inference and computational models.