Elizabeth Bruch
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.



