Welcome to my webpage

I am an analytical sociologist applying the toolbox of computational social science to three substantial research areas: cultural dynamics, social norms, and inequality.

Much of my work centers around how people use social cues to guide their choices (to select a worthwhile book, to break only irregularly sanctioned norms, to express their true opinions) and how these behaviors interact to bring about hard-to-predict outcomes on the collective level (the emergence of bestsellers, normative change, swings in public discourse).

Besides that, I am passionate about a spatial perspective to sociology.

At IAS, I head an international research group studying the dynamics of public discourse based on vast archives of digitized and online text. Funded by a generous grant from the Swedish Research Council, we develop machine-learning applications for the analysis of text in sociology. Using digitized corpora as social sensors, our research explores sudden swings in public opinion and the emergence of widely shared interpretations of developments and events in society.

My research appeared in journals such as the European Sociological Review, Poetics, Rationality & Society, Social Forces, Sociological Science, and Sociological Methods & Research.

I publish results that are strongly infused by sociological theorizing also in general interest journals, including Environment & Behavior, the Journal of Computational Social Science, Management Science, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Science Advances, and Scientific Reports.

Online presence

News

Selected works

Three recent publications

  • Keuschnigg, M., van de Rijt, A., & Bol, T. 2023. The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners. European Sociological Review.
  • Stein, J., Keuschnigg, M., & van de Rijt, A. 2023. Network segregation and the propagation of misinformation. Scientific Reports.
  • Arvidsson, M., Lovsjö, N., & Keuschnigg, M. 2023. Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities. Nature Human Behaviour.

Three often cited works

  • Keuschnigg, M., Lovsjö, N., & Hedström, P. 2018. Analytical sociology and computational social science. Journal of Computational Social Science 1 (1), 3-14.
  • Keuschnigg, M. & Wolbring, T. 2015. Disorder, social capital, and norm violation: Three field experiments on the broken windows thesis. Rationality and Society 27 (1), 96-126.
  • Keuschnigg, M., Mutgan, S., & Hedström, P. 2019. Urban scaling and the regional divide. Science Advances 5 (1), eaav0042.

Publications

2023

2021

Research

Organisation