School of Sociology seminar series - 'The Emergence of Inequality in Social Groups'
Dr Milena Tsvetkova (LSE)
Thursday 8th November, 1pm. Room D418, Newman Building.
All welcome to attend, tea and coffee will be served before the seminar and please feel free to bring along your lunch.
From
small communities to entire nations and society at large, inequality in wealth,
social status, and power is one of the most pervasive and tenacious features of
the social world. What causes inequality to emerge and persist? In this talk, I
will present recent and current research that investigates how the structure
and rules of our interactions can increase inequality in social groups. In a
recent meta-analytic study, we looked into the effects of four structural
conditions – network structure, network fluidity, reputation tracking, and
punishment institutions – on the distribution of earnings in network
cooperation games. We analyzed 33 experiments comprising 96 experimental
conditions altogether and found that there is more inequality in clustered networks
compared to random networks, in fixed networks compared to randomly rewired and
strategically updated networks, and in groups with punishment institutions
compared to groups without. Inequality emerges under these conditions because
fixed networks allow exploitation of the poor by the wealthy and clustered
networks foster segregation between the poor and the wealthy, while the burden
of costly punishment falls onto the poor, leaving them poorer. In current work,
we are developing large-scalegamified online experiments to study how
competition, group identity, and visibility of heterogeneity could further
increase inequality in cooperative environments. Overall, our research relates
to strategies and interventions to decrease inequality and mitigate its
negative impact, particularly in the context of mid- and large-sized
organizations and online communities.
Bio
Milena Tsvetkova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.Milena’s research interests lie in the fields of computational and experimental social science. She employs online experiments, network analysis, and agent-based models to study fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, contagion, segregation, and inequality. Currently, she is collaborating with computer scientists to combine gamification and citizen science and develop new methods for large-scale network experiments online.
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