Charlie Pilgrim

• Research Fellow at University of Leeds

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private solutio...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private solutio...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in these problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards public solutions such as global mitigation or free ride. However, many collective action problems today involve a third...

Concrete language, which has the property of readily evoking a mental image or sensory experience, has been extensively studied in language and is understood to facilitate processing speed, memory and understanding. Previous research points to a preference for concrete language. Is this preference visible in social media? Through a comprehensive ap...

Concrete language, which has the property of readily evoking a mental image or sensory experience, has been extensively studied in language and is understood to facilitate processing speed, memory and understanding. Previous research points to a preference for concrete language. Is this preference visible in social media? Through a comprehensive ap...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change 1–5 . Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private so...

We present evidence that the word entropy of American English has been rising steadily since around 1900. We also find differences in word entropy between media categories, with short-form media such as news and magazines having higher entropy than long-form media, and social media feeds having higher entropy still. To explain these results we deve...

Reports an error in "When fairness is not enough: The disproportionate contributions of the poor in a collective action problem" by Eugene Malthouse, Charlie Pilgrim, Daniel Sgroi and Thomas T. Hills (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023[Nov], Vol 152[11], 3229-3242). The third and final research question in The Collective-Risk Social...

Prior research offers mixed evidence on whether and when communication improves belief accuracy for numeric estimates. Experiments on one-to-one advice suggest that communication between peers usually benefits accuracy, while group experiments indicate that communication networks produce highly variable outcomes. Notably, it is possible for a group...

Interdependence occurs when individuals have a stake in the success or failure of others, such that the outcomes experienced by one individual also generate costs or benefits for others. Discussion on this topic has typically focused on positive interdependence (where gains for one individual result in gains for another) and on the consequences for...

Confirmation bias is defined as searching for and assimilating information in a way that favours existing beliefs. We show that confirmation bias emerges as a natural consequence of boundedly rational belief updating by presenting the BIASR model (Bayesian updating with an Independence Approximation and Source Reliability). In this model, an indivi...

This article is intended as a guide for new graduate students entering the field of computational science. With the increasing influx of students with diverse backgrounds joining the ever-popular field, the aim of this short guide is to help students navigate through the various computational techniques that they are likely to encounter during thei...

Many of our most pressing challenges, from combating climate change to dealing with pandemics, are collective action problems: situations in which individual and collective interests conflict with each other. In such situations, people face a dilemma about making individually costly but collectively beneficial contributions to the common good. Unde...

The Model AI Assignments session seeks to gather and disseminate the best assignment designs of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education community. Recognizing that assignments form the core of student learning experience, we here present abstracts of six AI assignments from the 2023 session that are easily adoptable, playfully engaging, and flex...

We study the problem of noisy information propagation in networks, where a small number of sources send messages across the network and agents use Bayesian updates to make inferences about the state of the world from the received messages. We provide upper bounds on the total number of sources necessary for learning on a given network and refine th...

Every time that you use a computer, you are using someone else’s code, whether that be an operating system, a word processor, a web application, research tools, or simply code snippets. Almost all code has some bugs and errors. In day to day life, these bugs are usually not too important or at least obvious when they do happen (think of an operatin...

Over the last few decades, psychologists have increasingly found that the mind stores and uses the statistics of its environment. However, less work has analyzed whether the environmental statistics have changed and what that would imply for the mind. In this chapter, we consider human memory as the solution to the computational problem of predicti...

Confirmation bias is defined as searching for and assimilating information in a way that favours existing beliefs. We show that confirmation bias is a natural consequence of boundedly rational belief updating by presenting the BIASR model (Bayesian updating with an Independence Approximation and Source Reliability). Upon receiving information, an i...

The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be computationally intractable. A more computationally efficient method of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is...

Over the past 200 years, rising rates of information proliferation have created new environments for information competition and, consequently, new selective forces on information evolution. These forces influence the information diet available to consumers, who in turn choose what to consume, creating a feedback process similar to that seen in man...

The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be computationally intractable. A more computationally efficient method of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is...

Coordinated human behaviour takes place within a diverse range of social organisational structures, which can be thought of as power structures with “managers” who influence “subordinates”. A change in policy in one part of the organisation can cause cascades throughout the structure, which may or may not be desirable. As organisations change in si...

Social organisational is critical to coordinated behaviour with a diverse range of management structures. In almost all organisations, a power structure exists with managers and subordinates. Often a change in one part can cause long-term cascades throughout the organisation, leading to inefficiencies and confusion. As organisations grow in size an...