Human & Social Systems

The Human & Social Systems (HS2) Division brings together diverse fields—from psychology to computational social science, linguistics, and cultural expertise—to understand the complexities of human motivations and behavior. This expertise informs decision-making, enhances operational effectiveness, and supports national security.

Capabilities

Employing advanced modeling techniques to simulate human decision-making processes and knowledge acquisition (individually and in groups), allowing national security strategies to anticipate and counter threats effectively.

Studying human reactions in diverse environments, including cyber contexts, informing training and strategies to mitigate risks effectively.

Pioneering test and evaluation concepts and aligning evaluations with DoD and Intelligence Community standards, bolstering the reliability of intelligence applications. Studying human reactions in diverse environments, including cyber contexts, informing training and strategies to mitigate risks effectively.

Dissecting communication patterns by utilizing natural language processing and linguistic analysis to provide insights into cultural and contextual factors critical for intelligence operations. Also, identifying key signals via multilingual text analysis.

Developing human-focused performance metrics, for example, credibility, cognition, and understanding, to improve test and evaluation of advanced technology and help develop training programs that improve mission outcomes and operational readiness.

What makes some social posts cuter than others? What emotions motivate us to action? University of Maryland researchers are working across disciplines to examine the characteristics of cuteness and how social media can influence human emotions and behavior.

College of Information Studies Associate Professor Susannah Paletz and Associate Research Scientist Ewa Golonka of the UMD Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), investigate the many emotions evoked by social media. Creating a unique measure for cuteness among other key emotions, they analyzed over 4,000 posts to unpack how emotional responses influence how information–and disinformation–is shared on social media.