KFU to research digital personality
Psychological Model of Subject Behavior in the Digital Environment is one of KFU projects set to receive funding from the Russian Science Foundation.
The project was led by representatives of the Institute of Psychology and Education, the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Information Technologies, and the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics. The team is headed by Professor Leonid Popov, Department of Clinical Psychology and Personality Psychology.
“The modern stage of society development we can characterize as the digital era, when digital technologies are penetrating deeper every day into various spheres of human life – economy, politics, social relations and others. In this regard, a new phenomenon for psychology has emerged – digital personality,” says the professor. “And the research within our project will be aimed at studying the peculiarities of human behavior in the digital space and the factors that determine these features. The final result of the work will be the development of a model, which with a high degree of probability will help psychologists to explain and predict human behavior in both real and digital environments.”
Chair of the Department of General Psychology Pavel Ustin notes, “For five years, from 2019 to 2023, we conducted a large-scale study of the possibilities of predicting the academic, professional and social success of social media users. It was also supported by a grant. During this time, we have formed a strong scientific team of psychologists and IT specialists, created tools for monitoring and analyzing the products of virtual human activity in social networks, and developed algorithms for predicting success.”
The scientists will study human behavior by analyzing various products of their virtual activity, primarily author’s texts that users post on various online platforms (LiveJournal, VK, Dzen, etc.).
According to Fail Gafarov, Chair of the Department of Information Systems, and Alexander Agafonov, Chair of the Department of Higher Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling, psychologists will be helped by tools related to artificial intelligence methods – machine learning, artificial neural networks, cognitive architectures, and large language models. With their help, the project executors want to try to “disassemble” human behavior to understand what it consists of and what can influence it.
As a result, scientists plan to significantly expand the research capabilities of modern psychology and develop digital models that would simulate the content of human behavioral actions, allowing for a variety of experimental studies of both the features of human behavior and the stimuli that cause them.