Ketika Garg, PhD

[ket̪ɪkɑ ɡərɡ]

केतिका गर्ग

Hi.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech working with Prof Dean Mobbs. I have a PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from UC Merced, where I worked with Profs Chris Kello & Paul Smaldino. Before moving to the US for the PhD life, I grew up in India and studied Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.

My research examines individual decisions and social interactions in naturalistic and digital environments, and how they scale into collective outcomes—from collective intelligence and effective coordination to polarization, conflict, and breakdowns in collaboration.

I am interested in (i) how individuals make adaptive decisions under cognitive, social, and environmental constraints and affordances, (ii) individual decision-making and socio-cognitive processes that shape dynamics of social interactions, and (iii) how local decisions and interactions give rise to emergent group- and network-level outcomes. To ask these questions, I integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines, and use a wide range of tools, such as gamified experiments with continuous decisions and real-time interactions, network science, social media analytics, agent-based modeling, reinforcement learning and other forms computational modeling.

Part of my work uses foraging-based paradigms to study how individuals—alone or socially—navigate uncertainty and risk in naturalistic environments, and how this shapes social interactions and group dynamics. More recently, I have extended this work into one of the more salient (and inescapable) environments of contemporary life: the online one. There, I am currently investigating cognitive processes and social interactions during communication (e.g., political debates) and how they can escalate into hostility and polarization, with implications for individual mental health and collective well-being.

When not researching (or even while researching), I often think about patterns and oddities of our social world — pressing questions like how science as a complex, collaborative institution works, and why Bollywood songs don’t last longer than 3 minutes anymore. I sometimes apply my computational skills to play around with these questions, given the plethora of social data around us.

I owe a large part of my work to my amazing collaborators and love collaborating — if you are interested in similar research themes and would like to collaborate, drop a line!