Session 01 - Introduction

Intro to theory 1 - First steps in modeling

1 Overview

Topic Duration Notes
Introduction 5 Lecturer introduction
Introduction of students in the plenum 5 Guiding questions: Name, home town, why chose this Empra. Write your name tag.
Formalia 20 Slides
Group formation 10 See Section 2
Skill: Git Intro 30 See Section 3
Lecture: Introducion: Theory crisis 45 Slides
Workshop: Group Exercise: Buri (Level 1) 60 Slides
[Homework 1]: Git Tutorial -
[Homework 2]: Smaldino (2013), Chapter 1 -

2 Group formation

2.1 Goal:

  • Put together groups where also unacquainted people meet -> increase network size.
  • Allow a certain freedom of choice, not completely random.
  • Ensure that at least one person is knowledgable of programming.

2.2 Create a “visual analog scale” (VAS) of programming skills in the room

While carrying their name tags, students find their position between two corners of the rooms, described as:

  1. “No programming knowledge at all, I even forgot everything I learned about R programming in the first semester”
  2. “I actively coded (in any language) in the last 3 months”

2.3 Semi-randomised allocation:

  • Collect all name tags, in the order of programming skills in the VAS.
  • Build 4 working islands (push tables together).
  • Distribute the name tags of the 4 most capable programmers in the room on the 4 tables.
  • Then select the next 4 names, who choose an island to join. But only 1 person is allowed to join each island at each round.

2.4 Round of introductions within the group (10 min)

  • Task: Think of a funny name for a donkey. This will be the group’s name.
  • Give a more detailed introduction to the other group members:
    • Career goals / type of psychologist they want to become
    • Specific programming skills

3 Git Intro

  1. Open the first slides of the IT-Tools presentation.
  2. Showcase how git works
    1. Lecturer creates a private project on Github for this course. This will be the central project for submitting homework.
    2. Students should create their Github accounts; add them as contributors to the course project.
    3. Show how to commit, push, pull changes.
  3. Students should create a Github account (if they have none), add all to the joint repo.

4 Homework 1 (individually)

Goals: Learn how to pull, commit, and push to Github. Be able to resolve a merge conflict.

If you already know how to do this, you can skip Homework 1. Otherwise, do the tutorial “Introduction to Version Control in R with RStudio, Git, and Github”, and complete the follow-up tutorial “Collaborative coding with GitHub and RStudio”. Depending on your prior knowledge, completing both tutorials will take between 30 min. and 2.5h.

Deliverable:

Push your answer from Homework 2 (see below) to the appropriate folder of the remote repository.

5 Homework 2 (individually)

Download Chapter 1 of Paul Smaldino’s Book “Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution”. Read the chapter and answer the following guiding questions:

  1. A typical criticism of formal models is: “You baked your results into the model, so the conclusions are trivial”. What could you answer to such a statement?
  1. What is done in a decomposition?
  1. What question should guide the decomposition?
  1. What is, according to Smaldino, the key difference between exact and inexact sciences?
  1. Name the two types of models that typically are employed in social sciences.

Deliverable: Submit answers to the guiding questions as a plain text/markdown file to the course’s Github repo (go to homework/session1 and upload an .md file with your name as filename). You can answer in English or in German. Most questions can be easily answered in one sentence. Feel free to copy and paste the relevant sentences from the paper. If you are tempted to use ChatGPT, better don’t do the homework at all (after all, the goal of this exercise is that you learn something, not that you make your lecturer happy).