Federico Zimmerman

Postdoctoral Fellow

Harvard Business School

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Emotions Lab within the Digital, Data, and Design Institute at Harvard Business School.

I am a computational social scientist who is interested in the psychological processes associated with social interactions. During my doctoral studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, I conducted research using a combination of experimental and computational methods to investigate the underlying psychological mechanisms behind affective polarization and political segregation.

Interests

Computational Social Science
Computational Modelling
Collective Behavior
Political Polarization

Education

PhD in Physics, 2023

Universidad Torcuato Di Tella / Universidad de Buenos Aires
BSc in Electronic Engineering, 2016

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Skills

Statistical Analysis

R, Python, Matlab

Mathematical Modeling

R, Python, Matlab

Online survey experiments

Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, PsyToolkit, Prolific, CloudResearch

Online custom experiments

Mobile software development

Teaching

Psychology & Research projects

Publications

Federico Zimmerman, David D Bailey, Goran Muric, Emilio Ferrara, Jonas Schone, Robb Willer, Eran Halperin, Joaquin Navajas, James J Gross, Amit Goldenberg (2024). Attraction to politically extreme users on social media.

Federico Zimmerman, Lucia Pedraza, Joaquin Navajas, Pablo Balenzuela (2024). Attraction by pairwise coherence explains the emergence of ideological sorting.

Federico Zimmerman, Gerry Garbulsky, Dan Ariely, Mariano Sigman, Joaquin Navajas (2022). Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity.

Federico Zimmerman, Diego Shalom, Pablo A. Gonzalez, Juan Manuel Garrido, Facundo Alvarez Heduan, Stanislas Dehaene, Mariano Sigman, Andres Rieznik (2016). Arithmetic on Your Phone. A Large Scale Investigation of Simple Additions and Multiplications.

Teaching experience

Lecturer (part-time)

Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Mar 2020 – Aug 2023

Part-time lecturer at Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology undergraduate course.

Teaching Assistant

Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Feb 2020 – Mar 2020

Teaching assistant at Neuroscience and Decision-making graduate course.

Teaching Assistant

Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Mar 2018 – Mar 2020

Teaching assistant at Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology undergraduate course.

Teaching Assistant

Universidad de Buenos Aires Mar 2014 – Mar 2016

Teaching assistant at Biomedical Engineering undergraduate course.

Selected Outreach Talks (in Spanish)

Fuckup Nights Buenos Aires

View it on YouTube Apr 2021

TEDx - ‘La matemática no es lo mío’

View it on YouTube Jan 2017

Selected Press

Extreme Views Are More Attractive Than Moderate Ones

Scientific American Apr 2023

Why is it so attractive to be politically radical?

Crowd Cognition Blog Mar 2022

How We Empower Political Extremists

Psychology Today Jan 2021