|Talks|

Making Social Structure Visible: How Knowledge Changes the Rules

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Elizabeth Bruch
Associate Professor, University of Michigan
Oct 30, 2025
10:30 am
EST
Oct 30, 2025
10:30 am
In-person
Portsoken Street
London, E1 8PH, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
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Talk recording

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.

About the speaker
Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. She directed Michigan’s Computational Social Science Initiative from 2018-2021 and is currently the associate director of UM’s Institute for Data Science and AI. She draws on tools from network and computer science, statistics, biology, and quantitative marketing to study (among other things) how people stumble their way through major life decisions such as where to live, who to date or marry, and what to major in during college. Her work has appeared in Science, PNAS, Science Advances, and the American Journal of Sociology among other outlets. She recently launched Revel, a non-profit dating app and research study aimed at college students and is finishing a book about U.S. dating markets.
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Oct 30, 2025