Mirta Galesic

Professor, Santa Fe Institute, USA

Personal website

Vita

Mirta Galesic is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, external faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM, and an associate researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with properties of the external environment to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. In one line of research, she examines how apparent cognitive biases in social judgements emerge as a product of the interplay between well-adjusted minds and the statistical structure of the social environment. In another line of research, she examines how collective performance depends on the interaction of group decision-making strategies and network structures. A third branch of research examines opinion dynamics in real societies using cognitively enriched models from statistical physics. And it investigates how people understand and cope with uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.

Research interests

  • Social rationality
  • Sampling and cognition
  • Risk communication
  • Survey methodology

Selected publications

Dalege, J., Galesic, M., & Olsson, H. (2023). Networks of beliefs: An integrative theory of individual-and social-level belief dynamics.

Galesic, M., Olsson, H., Pham, T. M., Sorger, J., & Thurner, S. (2023). Experiment shows that triadic social balance can be achieved through dyadic interactions. OSF Preprints. September, 25.

van der Does, T., Stein, D. L., Fedoroff, N., & Galesic, M. (2021). Science communication in light of moral and social concerns: testing a statistical physics model of belief change.

Galesic, M., Bruine de Bruin, W., Dalege, J., Feld, S. L., Kreuter, F., Olsson, H., ... & van Der Does, T. (2021). Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science. Nature, 595(7866), 214-222.