Joshua Plotkin Receives 5-Year, $3.9-Million Department of Defense Award

Joshua Plotkin, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Department of Biology, has received a 5-year, $3.9-million grant from the Minerva Research Program run by the U.S. Department of Defense. The funding will go toward a project called “The Language of Parasocial Influence and the Emergence of Extremism,” for which Plotkin is the principal investigator. Collaborators include colleagues from MIT, Cornell University, University of St. Andrews, and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas.

The research will focus on how social media influences the emergence of cultish formations and extremism online. “Fanatical groups and ideologies assembled online can rapidly transform into real-world coordinated action, destabilizing societies and threatening national security,” the researchers wrote in their project description. “Understanding and mitigating this threat demands the development of a new ‘cyber social science.’” Ultimately, they hope the work will lead to a “mechanistic understanding” of this behavior that can guide the design of interventions and mitigations.

Broadly, Plotkin’s lab uses mathematics and computation to study questions in evolutionary biology and ecology, with research in the group concerned primarily with adaptation in populations. Recent work has looked at reputation formation, social behavior and risk preferences, cooperation, and more.