Constance de Saint-LaurentAccenture · Biotechnology Unit
Constance de Saint-Laurent
PhD in Social and Human Sciences, University of Neuchatel
Researcher
About
67
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626
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a social psychologist working on trustworthy technology at Accenture the Dock
Publications
Publications (67)
History abounds in everyday life: It is in the discourse of the politician who makes a patriotic use of World War II, in the epic movie of medieval inspiration, in the latest museum opening in town, or in the magnet on your fridge that makes a humoristic use of advertisement posters from the 1950s. What tools can help us understand how history is u...
This paper examines the role played by malevolent linguistic creativity in the generation and maintenance of anti-immigration communities on Twitter. In order to understand this phenomenon, we combined data science and qualitative techniques for the analysis of 112,789 pro- and anti-immigration tweets with a focus on their hashtags. Our analysis po...
Full text in open access here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429465116
This article advances a narrative approach to internet memes conceptualized as partial stories that reflect, capture, and contribute to wider storylines. One key difficulty in studying memes as stories rests in the fact that narrative analysis often focuses on plot at the expense of roles and characters. Building on narrative psychology and, in par...
Misinformation has been a pressing issue since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, threatening our ability to effectively act on the crisis. More recently, the availability of vaccines in developed countries has not always translated into high vaccination rates, with online misinformation often presented as the culprit. Yet little is known about th...
Misinformation can have noxious impacts on cognition, fostering the formation of false beliefs, retroactively distorting memory for events, and influencing reasoning and decision-making even after it has been credibly corrected. Researchers investigating the impacts of real-world misinformation are therefore faced with an ethical issue: they must c...
Misinformation has been a pressing issue since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening our ability to effectively act on the crisis. Nevertheless, little is known about the actual effects of fake news on behavioural intentions. Does exposure to or belief in misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines affect people’s intentions to receive suc...
Misinformation continually threatens efforts to control the COVID‐19 pandemic, with vaccine misinformation now a key concern. False memories for misinformation can influence behavioural intentions, yet little is known about the factors affecting (false) memories for vaccine‐related news items. Across two experiments (total n = 1,481), this paper ex...
Misinformation can have noxious impacts on cognition, fostering formation of false beliefs, retroactively distorting memory for events, and influencing reasoning and decision making even after it has been credibly corrected. Researchers investigating the impacts of real-world misinformation are therefore faced with an ethical issue: they must consi...
Misinformation has continually threatened efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic, with vaccine misinformation now a key concern. False memories for misinformation can influence behavioural intentions, yet little is known about the factors affecting (false) memories for vaccine-related news items. Across two experiments (total N = 1,863), this pap...
This article offers a brief introduction to the special issue ‘New frontiers in creativity, learning, and technology research’ by situating the topic and explaining the events and previous publications that led to this new edition. It then gives an overview of the 12 papers included in the present collection and groups them under four main themes:...
The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, an...
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open Access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
Open access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/social-thinking-history-constance-de-saint-laurent/10.4324/9780429465116
This special edition is dedicated to the complex relationship between creativity, learning, and technology. In the present editorial, we consider this complexity in light of the papers included in this special issue, by summarizing their main ideas and connecting them to bigger questions surrounding the impact of technology on creativity and learni...
Steve Brown and Paula Reavey make an excellent case, in their paper "Memory in the Wild", for the importance of adopting an ecological perspective on memory. To adopt such an approach, they propose to use three concepts: life space, setting specificity, and experience-ecologies. In this commentary, I would like to build on their discussion of memor...
Collective memory has become an increasingly important topic in social and human sciences over the past thirty years. Beyond the interest for how we understand history, collective memory research has explored how the past has been used to defend certain understandings of the world (for instance nationalist ideologies), political actions (as in the...
There has been much hype, over the past few years, about the recent progress of artificial intelligence (AI), especially through machine learning. If one is to believe many of the headlines that have proliferated in the media, as well as in an increasing number of scientific publications, it would seem that AI is now capable of creating and learnin...
This paper offers a theoretical exploration of the psychological and social processes involved in perspective taking. Constructing the perspective of other people – i.e., how they view themselves, others, and the world – requires perspective takers to mobilise both personal experiences and cultural resources. While these processes are rarely reflec...
In this chapter I look at the links between collective memory and the imagination of collective futures. Drawing on works on imagination and autobiographical memory, I first discuss the role of past experiences in imagining the future. I then explore the consequences of such a perspective for collective memories and collective futures, which will l...
In this introduction, the book editors discuss the importance of imagining the future in everyday and political life, as well as how it has been treated in social sciences. They conclude by outlining the sections of the book and presenting the different chapters.
There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self–other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies imagine others and otherness, defined in cultural, religious, and political terms. At the core of this political ima...
It is common wisdom that we, both as individuals and as members of societies, should learn from the past in order to avoid repeating the mistakes both us and others have made. Unfortunately, research on the topic has shown that we do quite the contrary: our collective memory, or our lay representation of the past, tends to present a rather biased,...
What does psychology have to offer to the pursuit of actualised democracy? Starting from the assumption – that we share with Moghaddam – that psychology has an important role to play in this regard, we propose to develop a cultural psychological perspective on the topic. To do so, we first revisit four common assumptions about democracy through the...
Doing scientific research is, in theory, a systematic and well-organised enterprise. Field works are planned, interview guides are prepared, participants are selected. And, if the job was done well, data is collected, analysed, interpreted in a proper, clean, scientific manner. In reality, however, things often go astray: field works get cancelled,...
It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instan...
This chapter explores the transformation of autobiographical memory in life transitions. To do so, it proposes a model of autobiographical memory as an oriented sociocultural act, whereby the person imaginatively distances herself from past experiences to produce a meaningful discourse on her past. This model is applied to the development of autobi...
Open access: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354067X17695769
How do we understand the broad history to which we belong? What meaning do we give to it and what role does it have in our lives? This paper proposes to approach collective memory from the perspective of the subject, adopting a developmental perspective to explore how people build specific relations and representations of the historical past. Build...
Collective memory, the one-sided and subjective vision the group holds of its own past, plays a central role
in defining who we believe we are and what the world is supposed to be. As such, being able to challenge
what is said of the past offers the possibility to imagine futures and build identities outside of what is
commonly accepted in society,...
This chapter focuses on the relationship between imagination and creativity as reflected in the study of creative imagination. It is argued that, in order to appreciate today's close association between imagination and creativity, we need first to consider the intellectual trajectory of these concepts before and after the advent of "scientific" psy...
Do we need reflexivity in order to be creative? Many would probably be inclined to see a connection between a contemplative attitude and creativity, an image deeply rooted in our (frequently) romantic conception of the genius (Montuori & Purser, 1995). Rodin’s well-known sculpture ‘The Thinker’ embodies this association, but it also opens up the qu...
About ninety years ago, Lev Vygotsky stated that most of our higher mental functions are culturally derived, and therefore that the uniqueness of humanity was in our ability to create history (Vygotsky, 1934/1997). Although he was more interested by how phylogeny and culture merge during ontogeny, he nevertheless left us with one important question...
This paper explores the meaning attributed to the national group as an entry point into how boundaries between the in-group and the out-group are formed. To do so, it focuses on the representation of the past of the group, taken as a symbolic resource able to produce a raison d’être for national groups, and does so within a dialogical framework. Us...
http://media.wix.com/ugd/345b8d_f60a26ee13f3465da9e11e3f4522398b.pdf
Projects
Projects (8)
The aim of this project is to analyse anti and pro immigration tweets around a few selected hashtags (around 110'000 tweets) using both natural language processing and more traditional psychological methods. The project looks, in particular, at the main characteristics of users and their tweets on each side of the debate, how immigrants are defined, and how current political polarisation shapes the debate. It also explores the creativity of users and how a new vocabulary and system of reference emerges within a community of users.
Our relation to facts, expertise, and knowledge has been the object of profound transformations over the past few years. Expressions such as “alternative facts”, “fake news”, or “post-truth” are now as familiar as they were once thought to be ludicrous. While recent media attention may make them seem more prominent than they actually are, it is difficult to deny that the Internet’s relationship with information and truth has taken, at least momentarily, a turn for the worst. More worrying still, it has been accompanied by a rise in violent and often extremist discourses, that have proliferated in some areas of the Internet and that are often justified by misinformation.
In this context, this project proposes to study how the perspectives of others – as more or less legitimate sources of information and as members of other social groups – are interacted with on social media. In particular, this project will focus on Reddit and Twitter discussions around polarising social events (terrorist attacks, migratory crises, etc.) and will use both qualitative and quantitative methods. More specifically, it will use data science methods to analyse the large amounts of data available online, and qualitative methods to explore in depth samples of the data.
This project is financed by a 2 years SNSF research grant (number 180686): http://p3.snf.ch/project-180686
This project come from my Master's dissertation, but it took a life of its own after I graduated. It looked at the references made to history in set of French parliamentary debates from 2006. It focused on how the past is mobilised to define the nation and to decide who to include and who to exclude. The main findings were that collective memory is profoundly dialogical and that the versions of the past defended by different political groups are built in opposition to each other.
