Joe B. Bak-Coleman

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I’m Joe Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Secuirty within the Columbia School of Journalism. My research focuses on understanding how collectives make decisions in the face of uncertainty. I’m particularly interested in understanding what makes collective decision-making work and how it can go awry. Over the past decade, I’ve worked on collective decision-making in a range of contexts from animal groups and social media to metascience.

work

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Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior

Communication technology radically reshapes our global social network. How do we ensure these changes will lead towards a sustainable, equitable and healthy world?
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Wise and foolish crowds

When do groups outperform individuals in cognitive tasks? Combining experiments and theory, this line of research examine fundamental principles underlying collective wisdom across human and animal groups.
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Animal Collectives

Animal groups often have to make life or death decisions in the absence of clear leader and limited individual information. How do social animals make sense of the world and why do they live together in the first place?

news

Jun 23, 2022 New publication out in Nature Human Behavior: Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation
Mar 1, 2022 New article out in Scientific American: A High-Speed Scientific Hive Mind Emerged from the COVID Pandemic
Nov 24, 2021 Op-ed published in The Conversation :The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta’s ‘average user’ data
Jul 14, 2021 “Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior” covered on Recode

selected publications

  1. Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior
    Bak-Coleman, J., Alfano, M., Barfuss, W., Van Bavel, J., Couzin, I., Donges, J, Galesic, M., Gersick, A., Kao, A., Moffett, M., Moran, R., Romanczuk, R., Rubenstein, D., and Centeno, M.
    PNAS 2021
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  2. The wisdom of stalemates: consensus and clustering as filtering mechanisms for improving collective accuracy
    Winkylmayr, C, Kao, A, Bak-Coleman, J, and Romanczuk, P.
    Proceedings B 2020
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  3. Individual and collective encoding of risk in animal groups
    PNAS 2019
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