human social dynamics in the wild

Ob·serv·a·to·ry. noun. Infrastructure housing scientific equipment for the study of natural phenomena

Social science Observatory: A controlled environment offering infrastructure, tools and services to study human social dynamics in the wild.

The issue - the human species needs to understand the forces that drive and modulate behavior if we are to stand a chance of designing society 2.0 - a society that amplifies and supports prosocial human behavior, agency, participation that can safety steward this planet. To this end the Social Science Observatory is a shared resource for the scientific community, for the study of human social behavior.

Our hypotheses include that human social behavior is largely context dependent, and altered contexts can generate vastly different forms of group dynamics to those commonly observed and that the study of humans in the wild will inform different ways of being that can better serve the species and the planet.

our approach

In situ sensors

We maintain our physical spaces as platforms. Run your experiment in our observatory. This includes the use of passive sensors and human confederates.

data Trusts & citizen science

Our in house data privacy expert builds custom solutions for our open data policy, in order to maximize how the public can engage with these findings and future experiments. We are building a data trust such that the data collected can be used for positive impact and protected from misuse.

collaborative

Taking out findings into praxis: We are partnered with many communities and experimental community spaces around the world who are taking inspiration and deploying these kinds of experiments for themselves.

modular toolkits

Online and offline  surveys gather subjective data from participants. We create modular survey components based on well validated scales so that anyone can build a custom survey for their own social experiments. This not only makes our approach scalable, but also ensures that incoming data from a range of sources is in a comparable format for large scale across site studies.

Open IRB

An accessible ethics review service for in-situ, amateur and non-institutionalized human social science.