“Making Social Structure Visible: How Knowledge Changes the Rules,” Elizabeth Bruch, University of Michigan

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Abstract: Our lives unfold within structures we rarely see. Marriage markets, college curricula, and career pathways all follow underlying logics that determine how choices made today shape opportunities tomorrow. Yet for those navigating them, these rules are largely opaque. Each person experiences only a narrow slice of a much larger system—no one sees the whole. In this talk, I discuss two projects that experimentally alter what people know about the social systems they inhabit. The first gives dating-app users feedback about the market they participate in and how effective their strategies are within it. The second gives college students a bird’s-eye view of curricular trajectories at their university and how those paths lead to post-graduation careers. Making social structures visible raises new normative, scientific, and practical challenges—chief among them, unintended consequences. I close by discussing how feedback loops complicate our models of social systems, and how new approaches might help us understand (and perhaps mitigate) the reflexive consequences of social knowledge.

Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and the Associate Director of Michigan’s Institute for Data and AI in Society. She is also an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and a former Fellow at both the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Her research integrates choice modeling, network science, and agent-based simulation to study how individual decisions shape—and are shaped by—structured social environments. She has made influential contributions to the study of residential segregation, marriage and dating markets, and higher education, with work published in Science, PNAS, Science Advances, Demography, and the American Journal of Sociology. Bruch’s contributions have been recognized by the Innovation Prize from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology and the Merton Prize from the International Network of Analytical Sociologists, as well as multiple best article awards. Her forthcoming book, Date Like a Local (Princeton University Press, expected 2026), offers a data-rich exploration of how cities shape romantic opportunities and courtship behavior. 

Lunch will be served at 11:30 am.