Dr. Frederic Gerdon
Research Interests
- impact of digitization on society, esp. social inequality; privacy; social impacts of artificial intelligence / algorithmic decision-making; survey experiments; causal inference
Profile/Career
Frederic Gerdon is a postdoc at the MZES and at the chair for Social Data Science and Methodology (School of Social Sciences). He received his doctoral degree (Dr. rer. soc) from the University of Mannheim's School of Social Sciences and was a member of the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS). He holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology (minor in Political Science) from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (2013–2017) and a Master's degree in Sociology from the University of Mannheim (2017–2019). Furthermore, he spent a study semester at the University of Vienna, Austria.
At the MZES, he is currently working on the project CAIUS (Consequences of AI-Based Decision Making for Urban Societies) that draws on agent-based modeling (simulations) to investigate the impact of artificial intelligence (automated decision-making) on social inequality.
Moreover, he is involved in a project for which we worked at the LMU Munich to measure privacy attitudes wih international survey data collections in several waves. This research is based on previous work that used survey experiments and showed changes in contextual privacy attitudes related to health data use from before to during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since his undergraduate studies, he has been working as a student research assistant at three chairs, involving various projects on social stratification, cultural sociology, international relations, and survey methodology. In his Master's thesis, he conducted a factorial survey experiment („vignette study“) to investigate the context dependence of privacy norms, showing how the perceived appropriateness of data transmissions may vary with the interaction of situational characteristics (e.g. data type, recipient, and data use).