ANR-Lab at the Grushin Conference
On April 11-13, 2024, the International Grushin Sociological Conference was held in Moscow. This is the main annual event for everyone who studies public opinion, understands and explains social processes and phenomena. This year's theme is “Metamorphoses of society and the research industry: new challenges.”
The Grushin Conference annually brings together representatives of industrial and academic sociology, practitioners and theorists; here there is a mutual enrichment of applied analysis and fundamental research.
This year, ANR-Lab members took part in the conference as speakers, moderators and listeners.
ANR-Lab analyst Sergey Davydov acted as program director and moderator of the section and round table “Time for Experiments: Artificial Intelligence at the Service of the Researcher.”.jpg)
Issues related to AI are being discussed by participants at the Grushin Conference for the fourth year in a row. If previously the issues of artificial sociality and the use of generative technologies were discussed, this year the main topic of discussion was the transformation of the profession of social researcher under the influence of AI.
In the introductory speech at the section, D. Isaenkov (MTS) drew attention to the fact that AI technologies have been the subject of mass discussion three times since the 1960s, and also outlined the main areas of their use in research practice: AI calls, facial recognition, synthetic people, field data collection, questionnaire programming, response processing, multimodality and computer vision.
Further discussion revealed that there are a number of artificial intelligence-based products available in the social and marketing research market. For example, D. Malysheva (Fastuna AI) demonstrated the capabilities of Masha, a digital moderator of qualitative interviews. The report by M. Nezgovorova was devoted to the experience of the OMI company in the field of using synthetic respondents in the field of marketing research. V. Cherny from Brand Analytics spoke about the use of ML technologies for analyzing large volumes of information, data collection, message language recognition, automated product analytics, etc.
Some presentations were devoted to methodological reflection on the use of AI in research. Thus, I. Bukhansky (VTsIOM) presented the results of automating the processing of unfinished telephone interviews from the VCIOM-Sputnik study. Researchers were able to achieve 80% accuracy in automated classification of such calls.
Anna Kartasheva, research fellow at ANR-Lab and Tatyana Oreshkina (Ural Federal University) gave a presentation “The dilemma of sufficient accuracy and transparency in recommendation services” and demonstrated the work of D. Collingridge’s dilemma using the example of three university recommendation services.
The report analyzed the reasons for unsuccessful launches of recommendation services, and also demonstrated the influence of user and developer expectations on the operation of services. According to the dilemma of sufficient accuracy, the user loses confidence in the system at a threshold of 65-67% accurate predictions, but accuracy above 90% can lead to ineffective operation of the system, which should provide equal opportunities for all interested actors. The understanding of whether the recommendation system is effective and whether it works as expected will depend on the performance targets.
The discussion continued at the round table, during which the participants spoke about the trends in the transformation of the research market and the role of the social researcher under the influence of AI, as well as related ethical and legal issues.
Stanislav Moiseev, partner of the Aventica group – the industrial partner of the laboratory – and an associate member of ANR-Lab took part as an expert in the section “Trendwatching: hype or research” as part of the “Future Research” track, where he presented the report “Trendwatching, foresight and monitoring: three different technologies for assessing the present and working with the future.” In his report, Stanislav shared his experience of futures research, compared its popularity with fortune telling with tarot cards, and noted various signs characterizing the three noted research technologies.
Daria Maltseva, head of ANR-Lab, and Irina Pavlova, deputy head, visited various tracks of the conference as listeners and shared their impressions.
Daria Maltseva, head of ANR-Lab:
After a short break, I took part in the Grushin Conference with great joy. I really liked the relevance of the agenda, pressing social and methodological issues – we talked about the situation of the “new normal” in society, and about the “hype” areas of application of AI in research work and trend watching and foresight as future research, and about new and non-standard areas of research beyond usual marketing and sociological tasks, and even discussed the “okolopatsansky” discourse around an understandable film. Pleasant surprises for me were the book “Modern Sociological Theories” by Jiri Šubrt and Denis Podvoisky, signed for the laboratory staff by the second author, as well as our article with colleagues, suddenly discovered in the collection of the journal “Sociodigger” (Maltseva D.V., Shcheglova T.E. ., Vashchenko V. A., Moiseev S. P. Healthy cities: Identification of current research trends in scientific literature and social media // Sociodigger 2022. T. 3. No. 9(21). Pp. 41–59).
Irina Pavlova, deputy head of ANR-Lab:
The International Grushin Sociological Conference is the main annual event for everyone who studies public opinion, explains social processes and phenomena, who can and is ready to answer the question “What is actually happening?”. For three days we talked about what was happening. The theme of this year's event is “Metamorphoses of society and the research industry: new challenges.” We live in an era of continuous challenges, almost on a daily basis. I sincerely believe that systematic and analytical thinking is one of the critical skills of today, when we find ourselves in an avalanche of information, when it is our personal responsibility to rationally analyze current events.
This year’s plenary session “The New 'Normal': Contours, Solutions, Problems” discussed exactly what kind of “new normal” is emerging in Russian society. How is this new normal different from the old one? What new processes and trends is it establishing, what are its problem areas, what kind of future is it shaping?
The speeches highlighted changes over the past two years, but I would talk about the emerging norm as commonplace over the past four years (consequences of the pandemic, geopolitical changes, digitalization and the development of AI). Experts noted that Russian society as a whole is now experiencing a decrease in the level of anxiety, an increase in the planning horizon and social optimism.
I would like to note that the “new normal” is not a new term. It is used in economic research almost with reference to the Great Depression. It’s about the new reality: “A new normal is a state to which an economy, society, etc. settles following a crisis, when this differs from the situation that prevailed prior to the start of the crisis" (Wikipedia). Today the situation is complicated by a very high degree of uncertainty and instability of the external environment. It seems to us that we are experiencing a level of upheaval that is unprecedented, but many things have already happened in history, and society has previously adapted to them. And now we are also looking for ways for our society to “settle” – to adapt after any shocks. I would say that the focus voiced at the plenary session about the “new normal” is rather a metaphor, and the content is about norms as practices, routines.
I would like to highlight a few more topics.
One of them is emotionally loaded consumption. The topic of consumer behavior that really touched me at the conference. The leading Russian scientist in the field of economic sociology V.V. Radaev introduced the term “emotionally loaded consumption”, when emotions in every act of consumer choice begin to dominate and largely predetermine the purchasing decision. The author focuses on special types of emotional behavior that are associated with the acquisition of excess goods and services in comparison with the current needs and/or financial capabilities of the consumer.
The categories of emotionally loaded consumption introduced by Vadim Valerievich (panic, impulsive and compulsive) combine emotional, cognitive and social elements. For example, panic consumption is accompanied by rush demand. Consumer expectations as a non-price factor of demand are discussed in all textbooks on economic theory. However, some categories of emotionally loaded consumption today are a feature of society’s struggle with stress and anxiety. It is no coincidence that this topic was presented at a session dedicated to the mental well-being of society. By the way, the topic of mental well-being was given quite serious attention, which makes me personally, as a researcher of quality of life issues, very happy.
Another very interesting topic is about artificial intelligence in its various manifestations. For example, is formulating queries for generative AI (GenAI) a hard or soft skill? In fact, today an important hygienic requirement when working with GenAI tools is knowledge of the product features (capabilities and limitations), operating principles, and areas of application. I am ready to argue that the amusingly formulated skill as “what to ask ChatGPT” has several levels of competencies that can be attributed to different categories of the skill continuum on the “hard-soft skills” scale.
Or here’s another interesting topic in the field of AI – the creation of synthetic respondents and synthetic populations. This is a significant innovation in marketing research, which entails the automation of certain operations, the emergence of new requirements for the skills of marketers, etc.