Describing Human Behaviour Through Computational Social Science

The possibilities offered by digital and Computational Social Science can improve our understanding of human behaviour as never before. The availability of behavioural data in a society where the digital has been widely adopted is because of two reasons: first, the vast amount of digital traces produced by people in their daily lives and related behaviours and, second, the possibility of running online experiments that can cover a large segment of a target population (we have seen online experiments with hundreds of thousands of participants). This chapter will discuss the opportunity offered by online large behavioural experiments. The implications for policymakers of this shift are the possibility of having behavioural insights both across different societies and better understanding and capturing within a country heterogeneity. In other words, large-scale online experiments combined with computational methods allow for unprecedented cognitive and behavioural based segmentation.