We congratulate Tim Neumann, research associate at the “Politics II” chair at the Institute for Social Sciences, on receiving the Verso Prize for his Master’s thesis. It is awarded annually by verso e.V., the association of friends and sponsors of the Institute of Social Sciences, for the best Bachelor's and Master's theses and is endowed with 500€.
The Master's thesis "The opinions of the others – arguments as intensifiers of social polarization during the coronavirus pandemic?" was created in the use case politics of the Manchot research group "Decision-making with the help of Artificial Intelligence" and was supervised by Dr Ole Kelm. Tim Neumann examined whether the reception of the arguments in the public debate on the appropriate handling of the coronavirus pandemic leads to greater polarization, and thus provided important insights for the work in the use case. The full abstract of the thesis (in German) can be found here.
Tim Neumann works as a research associate in the research project "AI support for policy decisions: development of tools and impact analysis" under the direction of Prof. Dr Stefan Harmeling, Prof. Dr Stefan Marschall and Prof. Dr Gerhard Vowe.