Simon Schweighofer

Simon Schweighofer has been a Postdoc at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna since August 2018, working together with David Garcia on the project “Emotional Wellbeing in the Digital Society”.

Simon’s academic background is sociology and clinical psychology, which he studied at University of Salzburg. He acquired his PhD and worked as a Postdoc at ETH Zurich in the group of Frank Schweitzer, exploring the social and affective mechanisms underlying political polarization.

Simon’s research focuses on the psychological and social mechanisms driving the emergence of social phenomena – an enterprise usually described as computational social science. To this purpose, he combines statistical analyses of large datasets with machine learning and natural language processing methods, as well as agent based modeling and network science. In particular, his research interests include political polarization, collective emotions, group identity, and the emergence of hierarchy in human societies.