Tanzhe Tang

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Science Lab in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. Before joining UvA, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen. I completed my PhD at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft.

As a computational social scientist, my research examines how emergent social phenomena—including polarization, opinion diffusion, and network–opinion co-evolution—arise from interactions among individuals. I primarily use agent-based modeling and social network analysis, especially Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models, with both synthetic and empirical network data. I also have experience teaching and supervising students in computational science and quantitative sociology.

I am currently studying the mechanisms of opinion polarization, including bounded confidence and negative influence. By integrating agent-based modeling with Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models, my collaborators and I aim to uncover the hidden sources of negative influence: what makes people move away from each other? See my latest publication in JASSS, co-authored with Andreas Flache and Tom Snijders.

I am also interested in statistical physics applications in social science. My work in this area includes opinion dynamics models based on the Ising model and Hopfield networks. The Action-Opinion Inference Model (AOI) is a representative example of this line of research. By combining insights from both statistical physics and social science, my work also contributes to multi-agent systems and social AI by designing, simulating, and analyzing intelligent systems of agent-agent and human-agent interactions. This is highlighted by my research on strategic obfuscation, which formalizes how highly autonomous agents dynamically minimize disclosed information in the AOI framework. The research can be applied to privacy protection in social media and human-AI communications.