Winter Mason

Winter Mason is a Computational Social Scientist (a.k.a. Data Scientist) at Facebook. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology and cognitive science from Indiana University in 2007, and did a post-doc in the Human and Social Dynamics lab at Yahoo. He researches social networks and social media, including crowdsourcing, group dynamics, and social influence.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

When exploring grad programs I was almost exclusively looking at cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience programs.  When I interviewed at Indiana, they introduced me to Sarah Queller, who was working on mathematical models of stereotyping.  I was greatly intrigued and found Indiana to be a really great fit, so found myself in the only social psychology program I looked at.  After Sarah left the next year, I ended up splitting my PhD focus into cognitive science with Rob Goldstone and social psychology with Eliot Smith, which turned out to be a great boon to my research.

Briefly summarize your current work, and any future work you plan to pursue. 

Currently I am on the Core Data Science team at Facebook, which is a group of researchers with very diverse backgrounds (including statistical physics, computer science, sociology, psychology, communications, political science, and more) who lend their skills and expertise to different teams within the company.  For the past two years I have been working with the Civic Engagement team, whose goal is to give people a greater voice in their government.  My role has been to do foundational research that guides how new features might be designed and built, develop models and algorithms to improve the targeting and experience with different features, and impact research that assesses the real-world effects of the features that the team builds.  As one example, the team built a feature that lets political candidates or parties share their positions on different political issues, and then provided an interface so that users can compare the positions of the different candidates or parties on specific issues.  I helped design and analyze the survey that demonstrated the feature significantly increased people's knowledge of the candidates' positions.

Why did you join SPSP?

Initially I joined SPSP because I was anticipating a career in academia and felt like being a part of the society would be helpful for my career as a professor in psychology.  After I finished my PhD and found myself in an industry job, I wanted to continue being a member of SPSP because I wanted to stay connected to the community and stay on top of the latest social psychological research.

What is your most memorable SPSP Annual Convention experience?

There really are so many good ones.  Challenging my fellow graduate students to approach and talk to "big names" at the first conference I ever attended.  Giving my first panel talk on social media data, after I had finished grad school and started at Yahoo Research.  Starting up a conversation with Sam Gosling while in line for coffee at one SPSP, which eventually led to co-authoring a chapter with him in the Handbook of Psychology a few years later.  But probably the best was a couple of years ago.  For a long time I had been arguing that social psychologists should pay more attention to social media / online observational data as a means for understanding (social) psychological processes.  The year I was finally able to put together a panel on social media and psychology, I arrive to the conference and find that there are 3 or 4 other panels on roughly the same topic.  I had this simultaneous feeling of exasperation, because the panel I thought would be really ground breaking was just one of many, and triumph, because it was obvious the soap box I had been on for a while was finally being accepted as main stream.  In the end, the feeling of accomplishment won out, and my bond to the society was even stronger.

How has being a member of SPSP helped to advance your career?

This is an easy one.  It was at the SPSP conference that I met Jonah Berger, who was interested at the time in the role of networks in social influence, and I was presenting a poster on my research in that area.  We struck up a conversation as a result and started brainstorming potential collaborations.  It was because of this collaboration that he later introduced me to Duncan Watts, which led me to apply for the job at Yahoo Research, which turned me into the computational social scientist that I am today.  That definitely would not have happened if I wasn't a member of SPSP attending the annual conference.

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

I think my general advice for anyone considering graduate school applies here: consider the job opportunities before committing to the program.  In social and personality psychology, a lot of emphasis is traditionally placed on an academic career, but the number of faculty jobs is limited, so anyone considering the career should also look at non-academic jobs and decide whether that career track is also appealing.  Aside from the rare jobs like mine in the tech industry, there are many opportunities in marketing, user experience research, and consulting, and it's worthwhile to explore these career paths before starting grad school.

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

Honestly, I enjoy the work that I do so much that I end up spending my free time doing work outside my direct job responsibilities, whether it is exploring new directions for research, diving deeper in an analysis, or reading the latest literature in the field.  But outside of research, I have gotten to travel a lot for my job, and always try to add a few days of personal vacation to the trips.  When not traveling, I like to go on hikes with my dog, take care of my home, and spend time with my girlfriend.

Variability is the Future: Modeling Change in Social Psychology

The sheep are loose, and the sheepdogs—two players in a psychology experiment developed by researchers Michael Richardson and Patrick Nalepka—must get them back into the herd! How they solve this problem appears to be governed by a relatively simple mathematical model representing a few different state variables.

When people start playing the game, Richardson explained at a talk on dynamical methods this morning at the Dynamic Systems and Computational Modeling Preconference at the SPSP Annual Convention, they tend to begin with a search and recovery strategy. When a sheep gets too far away from the center, they chase it back in.

But as they get more experienced, they tend to hit upon an optimal strategy: cycle back and forth around the herd in the center, as a pair of oscillators encircling the herd in an even way.

Then Richardson deftly steps through a series of simple mathematical representations of first the search and recovery strategy—the distance of the furthest sheep, the angle of the sheep, the radius of the “home base”—and the oscillating containment strategy. Finally, he includes a parameter that governs how people switch between strategies.

When he demonstrated his model, there were a few spontaneous bursts of surprised laughter from the audience. The behavior of the mathematical representation closely mimicked the play of humans, chasing sheep until they had them rounded up and then running oscillating containment routes.

But this was just one of the many approaches Richardson demoed to examine how behavior unfolds over time. His research group at the University of Cincinnati offers a week-long workshop on Nonlinear Methods for Psychological Science every summer, and his presentation today touched on many of these—from cross-recurrence quantification analysis to explicit mathematical models of coupled oscillators to extracting summary measures of complexity like the fractal dimension.

These models have allowed him to capture patterns of variability across a variety of situations—such as individuals trying to avoid collision following crossed paths or jazz pianists improvising with each other.

In work with Ashley Walton, he has found, for example, that when jazz pianists are riffing off of a simple “drone” versus a standard swing track, they tend to exhibit more coordinated patterns of playing. They believe the simplicity of the drone background doesn’t create enough regularity to allow for more diverse improvisatory moves—while the regular pattern of the swing track allows for these moves. This finding came naturally from an approach focused on variability over time.

Underlying this dynamical perspective is a conviction that psychologists don’t need to just model minds, and they don’t need to just pay attention to summary statistics from experiments. Instead, we should be thinking more about specific task dynamics and how behavior changes over time. When we explore dynamics, we open up a whole new frontier for description and explanation.


Alex Danvers is a PhD student in social psychology studying emotions in social interactions. He uses dynamical systems and evolutionary perspectives, and is interested in new methods for exploring psychological phenomena. 

What Does 'Diversity' Mean to You? The Answer May Depend on Your Race

Diversity in the workplace has been a contentious issue for many employers. In May 2014, Google disclosed that 70% of its employees are male, and in terms of racial diversity, the company is 61% White, 30% Asian, 3% Hispanic and 2% Black. Does that breakdown sound diverse to you? If not, what would an ideal diverse team look like? A study publishing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sheds light on the complexity in defining diversity.

Previous research has shown that higher levels of diversity are associated with more trust, increased feelings of safety and social satisfaction, and heightened expectations that people can expect to be treated fairly and have the same opportunities as others in an organization. Researchers from the University of California at Irvine, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Los Angeles collaborated to study how Whites, Asian Americans, and African Americans evaluate diversity. The research included three studies, and participants were asked to rate the diversity of various groups of people that were presented as a team at work.

Differing Perceptions of Diversity

Studies 1 and 2 found that in-group representation—that is, seeing members of one's own race included in the group— increased perceived diversity, even when the number of racial groups and number of racial minority group members was held constant. Asian Americans perceived more diversity in a group that included Whites and Asian Americans than a group that included Whites and African Americans. African Americans rated a group with Whites and African Americans as more diverse than one with Whites and Asian Americans.

Studies 2 and 3 showed that concerns about discrimination play a role in why racial minority group members are especially attuned to whether their race is represented. Study 2 showed that in-group representation had a larger effect on diversity judgments made by Asian Americans who considered national statistics about discrimination against Asian Americans before judging diversity than those who did not. Also, the in-group representation effect disappeared when Asian Americans first considered national statistics about discrimination against African Americans; these individuals rated a team of Whites and African Americans as equally diverse as a team of Whites and Asians. Study 3 measured concerns about diversity and showed that it mediated the relation between team composition and diversity judgments.

Importance of Diversity

The studies identified differences in how Asian Americans and African Americans judge diversity. In-group representation was generally more important to African Americans than Asian Americans, and in-group representation was equally important for African Americans regardless of whether they considered discrimination against African Americans, Asian Americans, or did not consider discrimination before judging diversity. Therefore, people—especially scholars, managers, and policy makers—should be careful not to assume that all racial minority groups approach questions about diversity in the same way. Lead researcher Christopher Bauman notes that, "More research needs to consider the unique perspective of each racial group. A lot of valuable insights have come from research that contrasted majority and minority groups, but finer grained analysis will become increasingly important as the country continues to become more diverse."

The research illustrates that people from different races may view the same team or organization and judge it differently in terms of whether or not it's diverse. "Racial minority group members care whether or not members of their own race are part of a team. While the presence of other minority groups is better than no diversity at all, it's not the same as having someone of your own race present," Dr. Bauman says, "You can't lump racial minority groups together and treat them as a monolithic whole. Each racial group has its own history and faces unique challenges, and it should not be surprising that they approach situations differently." Understanding how individuals experience diversity in the workplace is a much more complex issue than simply knowing the percentage of each race present in a team or organization.

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Bauman, C.W., Trawalter, S., Unzueta, M.M. (2014). Diverse According to Whom? Racial Group Membership and Concerns about Discrimination Shape Diversity Judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(10). http://psp.sagepub.com/content/40/10/1354.abstract

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), published monthly, is an official journal of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. The Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. Follow us on Twitter, @SPSPnews and find us at facebook.com/SPSP.org