Prof. Natalia Vélez is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and the PI of the Princeton CoLab, which studies the cognitive capacities and community dynamics that make human collaboration possible, combining online and in-person behavioral studies with children and adults, Bayesian cognitive models, fMRI, and analyses of large datasets. Natalia earned her B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and her Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford University. 

Title: Understanding Structural Diversity in Human Collaboration

Abstract:
Humans form an incredible variety of teams to achieve goals that are beyond the reach of a single person. Some teams are big, while others are small; some have leaders, while others are decentralized; some are embedded in formal institutions, while others are informal; some are transient, while others are enduring. This wide range of team structures poses a challenge to psychological theories of collaboration, which have shed light on the individual cognitive capacities that enable collaboration but have been largely silent on how these micro-scale processes give rise to the macro-scale structure of teams. When are particular team structures needed to solve particular problems? As a first step towards this question, I will present recent work on One Hour One Life, a multiplayer online game where players can build technologically advanced settlements from scratch (N = 22,011 players, 428,255 characters played, 1,486 settlements comprising 3–8,095 characters). This dataset offers a rare opportunity to watch communities self-organize to navigate basic problems of survival. I will present evidence that these virtual communities replicate scaling relationships that have been documented in real-world cities, and that player behavior systematically changes with community size. These findings demonstrate that online games provide a powerful tool to understand basic principles of social organization. More broadly, they lay the groundwork for using gamified experiments to test when and how particular group structures emerge, and how they shape the outcomes of collaborations.