Open Research Repository

The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.

For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu

Recent Submissions

  • ItemOpen Access
    How research programs come apart:The example of supersymmetry and the disunity of physics
    (2023) Gautheron, Lucas; Omodei, Elisa; Department of Network and Data Science
    According to Peter Galison, the coordination of different “subcultures” within a scientific field happens through local exchanges within “trading zones.” In his view, the workability of such trading zones is not guaranteed, and science is not necessarily driven towards further integration. In this paper, we develop and apply quantitative methods (using semantic, authorship, and citation data from scientific literature), inspired by Galison’s framework, to the case of the disunity of high-energy physics. We give prominence to supersymmetry, a concept that has given rise to several major but distinct research programs in the field, such as the formulation of a consistent theory of quantum gravity or the search for new particles. We show that “theory” and “phenomenology” in high-energy physics should be regarded as distinct theoretical subcultures, between which supersymmetry has helped sustain scientific “trades.” However, as we demonstrate using a topic model, the phenomenological component of supersymmetry research has lost traction and the ability of supersymmetry to tie these subcultures together is now compromised. Our work supports that even fields with an initially strong sentiment of unity may eventually generate diverging research programs and demonstrates the fruitfulness of the notion of trading zones for informing quantitative approaches to scientific pluralism.
  • ItemOpen Access
    On the forecastability of food insecurity
    (2023-12) Foini, Pietro; Tizzoni, Michele; Martini, Giulia; Paolotti, Daniela; Omodei, Elisa; Department of Network and Data Science
    Food insecurity, defined as the lack of physical or economic access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food, remains one of the main challenges included in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Near real-time data on the food insecurity situation collected by international organizations such as the World Food Programme can be crucial to monitor and forecast time trends of insufficient food consumption levels in countries at risk. Here, using food consumption observations in combination with secondary data on conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, we build a forecasting model based on gradient boosted regression trees to create predictions on the evolution of insufficient food consumption trends up to 30 days in to the future in 6 countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen). Results show that the number of available historical observations is a key element for the forecasting model performance. Among the 6 countries studied in this work, for those with the longest food insecurity time series, that is Syria and Yemen, the proposed forecasting model allows to forecast the prevalence of people with insufficient food consumption up to 30 days into the future with higher accuracy than a naive approach based on the last measured prevalence only. The framework developed in this work could provide decision makers with a tool to assess how the food insecurity situation will evolve in the near future in countries at risk. Results clearly point to the added value of continuous near real-time data collection at sub-national level.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Social media users experience more political hostility in less economically equal and less democratic societies
    (2026-04-03) Bor, Alexander; Marie, Antoine; Pradella, Lea; Petersen, Michael Bang; Democracy Institute
    There is widespread concern about the hostility of political discussions on social media, but there is no consensus about the underlying dynamics. In particular, the relationship between online hostility and the broader sociopolitical context has received less attention, in part because of limited research outside Western countries. Here we report results from observational data collected through quota-sampled online surveys in 30 countries across six continents (N = 15,202) about experiences of online hostility. Our findings show that people in less democratic and less economically equal countries experience more hostility online. We also found that, in every country, respondents who are hostile online are also hostile offline and that these people score higher in status-seeking motivations. Exploratory analyses suggest that less democratic societies include more status-motivated individuals and young men—groups showing higher hostility on average. Overall, these findings highlight how online political hostility is intertwined with wider societal tensions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Can infants adopt underspecified contents into attributed beliefs? Representational prerequisites of theory of mind
    (2021-08) Kovács, Ágnes Melinda; Téglás, Ernő; Csibra, Gergely; Department of Cognitive Science
    Recent evidence suggests that young infants, as well as nonhuman apes, can anticipate others' behavior based on their false beliefs. While such behaviors have been proposed to be accounted by simple associations between agents, objects, and locations, human adults are undoubtedly endowed with sophisticated theory of mind abilities. For example, they can attribute mental contents about abstract or non-existing entities, or beliefs whose content is poorly specified. While such endeavors may be human specific, it is unclear whether the representational apparatus that allows for encoding such beliefs is present early in development. In four experiments we asked whether 15-month-old infants are able to attribute beliefs with underspecified content, update their content later, and maintain attributed beliefs that are unknown to be true or false. In Experiment 1, infants observed as an agent hid an object to an unspecified location. This location was later revealed in the absence or presence of the agent, and the object was then hidden again to an unspecified location. Then the infants could search for the object while the agent was away. Their search was biased to the revealed location (that could be represented as the potential content of the agent's belief when she had not witnessed the re-hiding), suggesting that they (1) first attributed an underspecified belief to the agent, (2) later updated the content of this belief, and (3) were primed by this content in their own action even though its validity was unknown. This priming effect was absent when the agent witnessed the re-hiding of the object, and thus her belief about the earlier location of the object did not have to be sustained. The same effect was observed when infants searched for a different toy (Experiment 2) or when an additional spatial transformation was introduced (Experiment 4), but not when the spatial transformation disrupted belief updating (Experiment 3). These data suggest that infants' representational apparatus is prepared to efficiently track other agents' beliefs online, encode underspecified beliefs and define their content later, possibly reflecting a crucial characteristic of mature theory of mind: using a metarepresentational format for ascribed beliefs.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Closer during crises? European identity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
    (2024-03-15) Nicoli, Francesco; van der Duin, David; Beetsma, Roel; Bremer, Björn; Burgoon, Brian; Kuhn, Theresa; Meijers, Maurits J.; de Ruijter, Anniek; Department of Political Science
    Do crises bring us closer together? Many have observed how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, several European societies experienced a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. While this certainly took the form of support for incumbent governments, anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals’ European identification may have been affected as well. In this paper, we exploit the unique timing and panel nature of a survey, whose respondents were interviewed in March/beginning of April 2020, again in July 2020, and finally in November 2022 to analyze whether a change in attachment to Europe occurred between the first and the second wave of the pandemic and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results show that the emotive dimension of EU attachment changed over the course of these crises, increasing both during the Covid pandemic and after the invasion of Ukraine. Our results support the view that symmetric crises tend to bring people closer together, suggesting that far-reaching EU-level actions in case of crises create, rather than require, a perception of belonging to an EU-level community.
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