Article by Michael Maes, Andreas Flache, Károly Takács and Karen A. Jehn wins Anatol-Rapoport-award

The section "Model Building and Simulation" of the German Sociological Association has given this year's Anatol-Rapoport-award for an outstanding scientific publication of a German scientist to Michael Maes, Andreas Flache, Károly Takács and Karen A. Jehn for their paper "In the short term we divide, in the long term we unite: Demographic crisscrossing and the effects of faultlines on subgroup polarization". This paper is forthcoming in  Organization Science. Michael Maes has been an ICS PhD student and postdoc at our department until 2011 where he took his PhD in 2010.

The paper formalizes the theory of demographic faultlines proposed by Lau and Murnighan in terms of a computational model. It moves beyond the original theory by showing how actors in bridge positions between demographic subgroups can help to overcome in the long run polarization in a team that initially arises due to strong demographic faultlines. The authors furthermore derive propositions about how group composition and individual decision mechanisms affect  the efficiency and duration of the process of consensus formation. The jury states in its report that the paper "impresses with its formal elegance and proves once more how useful formal modelling and computer simulation can be to address research problems in the social sciences." (translated).

The award is shared with Clemens Kroneberg and Andreas Wimmer for their paper "Struggling over the boundaries of belonging. A formal model of nation building, ethnic closure, and populism", published in 2012 in the American Journal of Sociology (118/1:176-230).