Agnieszka Rychwalska

Social, Psychological and Technological Determinants of Energy Use

The traditional supply-side model of energy generation and use is changing rapidly. Two major, inter-dependent problems that electric power grids currently face are sustainability in the long run and dealing with the peaks and lows of demand in the short term.

Privacy-by-Norms Privacy Expectations in Online Interactions

In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it personal, and nearly all of it valuable. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. This position paper proposes a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, whereby data collection and data protection norms are configured by the users themselves, using a collaborative participatory process of argumentation. This refers to the ability of users to understand privacy-related documents and their implications via participatory processes, wisdom-of-the-crowds approaches and visual cues. By strengthening the trust bond between service developers and users, the transformative impact of this solution, called Privacy-by-Norms (Pb Norms), will be to encourage innovation and to ensure that (big) datas (tiny) generators are also its beneficiaries. Pb Norms will aim to complement existing top-down solutions to data protection that rely on technical or legal provisions. The goal is to enable citizens to express their privacy expectations through the use of mature ICT technologies from the fields of Computational Argumentation and the Semantic Web.

Understanding Cognition Through Functional Connectivity

With every word that you read on this page, your brain orchestrates a symphony of electrical sounds – millions of neurons perform at the same time and billions of synapses coordinate their sounds. If you make yourself a break and start preparing a coffee, a new array of neural musicians will become active. While we know right now quite well how these functions that you perform are segregated in the brain – that is, which set of neurons activates to enable your reading and which to make you remember where you put the coffee jar – it still remains a challenge to understand how the brain integrates separated tasks into a coherent function. How does it happen that the letters form a word in your mind and the words form a meaningful sentence? How do you coordinate the movement of your hands when you reach for the cup with one and for the coffee pot with the other? New tools made available by complexity sciences – the modern network theory – give us a unique chance to describe and measure the integration of information in the brain that is crucial for any function it performs.

No Need For Speed: Modeling Trend Adoption In A Heterogeneous Population

The speed of social and technological changes is constantly increasing. Change is a pre-requisite for economic development but this increasing speed carries additional costs that may largely affect the ability of the social systems to adopt them. While the financial costs constitute a limit to adoption, the psychological and social costs may also profoundly change the adoption potential. In an agent-based model of a heterogeneous population of adopters we explore the consequences of increasing the speed of novelty introduction on their satisfaction and the degree to which new trends may permeate the system. We show that introduction speed has a diametrically different impact on different adopter groups: opinion leaders are most satisfied when the mainstream individuals are least content and vice versa. Moreover, introduction speed profoundly affects the ability of trends to penetrate the system — the lower the introduction speed, the higher the level of penetration of the social system. With high speed of introduction, only a small fraction of the most attractive novelties is able to permeate the system. In sum, these results show that both the wellbeing of the social system as well as its capacity to adopt novelties are dependent on the speed of change.

Functional Synchronization: The Emergence of Coordinated Activity in Human Systems

The topical landscape of psychology is highly compartmentalized, with distinct phenomena explained and investigated with recourse to theories and methods that have little in common. Our aim in this article is to identify a basic set of principles that underlie otherwise diverse aspects of human experience at all levels of psychological reality, from neural processes to group dynamics. The core idea is that neural, behavioral, mental, and social structures emerge through the synchronization of lower-level elements (e.g., neurons, muscle movements, thoughts and feelings, individuals) into a functional unit—a coherent structure that functions to accomplish tasks. The coherence provided by the formation of functional units may be transient, persisting only as long as necessary to perform the task at hand. This creates the potential for the repeated assembly and disassembly of functional units in accordance with changing task demands. This perspective is rooted in principles of complexity science and non-linear dynamical systems and is supported by recent discoveries in neuroscience and recent models in cognitive and social psychology. We offer guidelines for investigating the emergence of functional units in different domains, thereby honoring the topical differentiation of psychology while providing an integrative foundation for the field.

Medium Moderates the Message. How Users Adjust Their Communication Trajectories to Different Media in Collaborative Task Solving

Rapid development of information and communications technologies (ICT) has triggered profound changes in how people manage their social contacts in both informal and professional contexts. ICT mediated communication may seem limited in possibilities compared to face-to-face encounters, but research shows that puzzlingly often it can be just as effective and satisfactory. We posit that ICT users employ specific communication strategies adapted to particular communication channels, which results in a comparable effectiveness of communication. In order to maintain a satisfactory level of conversational intelligibility they calibrate the content of their messages to a given medium’s richness and adjust the whole conversation trajectory so that every stage of the communication process runs fluently. In the current study, we compared complex task solving trajectories in chat, mobile phone and face-to-face dyadic conversations. Media conditions did not influence the quality of decision outcomes or users’ perceptions of the interaction, but they had impact on the amount of time devoted to each of the identified phases of decision development. In face-to-face contacts the evaluation stage of the discussion dominated the conversation; in the texting condition the orientation-evaluation-control phases were evenly distributed; and the phone condition provided a midpoint between these two extremes. The results show that contemporary ICT users adjust their communication behavior to the limitations and opportunities of various media through the regulation of attention directed to each stage of the discussion so that as a whole the communication process remains effective.