Dhruv Mittal

L6.25, LAB 42,

Science Park,

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Hi, I’m Dhruv — a physicist-turned-computational-social-scientist trying to make sense of how people behave, decide, and occasionally surprise us all. I started off in the lab, experimenting with collectives of atoms and molecules. These days, I study collectives of people — modeling how ideas spread, norms shift, and societies (sometimes) change for the better.

I’m currently doing my PhD at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), blending agent-based modeling, network science, and behavioral economics to explore how individual quirks scale up to social patterns. My research is driven by a big-picture question:

How can societal change bring us back into balance with the ecological systems we depend on?

I’m especially interested in the feedback loops between social behavior, policy, and the environment — and in designing interventions that nudge us toward more sustainable futures. When I’m not busy simulating societies or chasing down weird emergent behaviors, I’m probably reading a travel memoir, hiking somewhere green, or deep in a prog rock song that’s at least 7 minutes too long.

Let’s decode collective behavior — and maybe help the planet while we’re at it.

selected publications

Anticonformists catalyze societal transitions and facilitate the expression of evolving preferences

Dhruv Mittal, Sara M Constantino, and Vítor V Vasconcelos

PNAS Nexus, Jul 2024

Abs DOI

The world is grappling with emerging, urgent, large-scale problems, such as climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and pandemics, which demand immediate and coordinated action. Social processes like conformity and social norms can either help maintain behaviors (e.g. cooperation in groups) or drive rapid societal change (e.g. rapid rooftop solar uptake), even without comprehensive policy measures. While the role of individual heterogeneity in such processes is well studied, there is limited work on the expression of individuals’ preferences and the role of anticonformists—individuals who value acting differently from others—especially in dynamic environments. We introduce anticonformists into a game-theoretical collective decision-making framework that includes a complex network of agents with heterogeneous preferences about two alternative options. We study how anticonformists’ presence changes the population’s ability to express evolving personal preferences. We find that anticonformists facilitate the expression of preferences, even when they diverge from prevailing norms, breaking the “spiral of silence” whereby individuals do not act on their preferences when they believe others disapprove. Centrally placed anticonformists reduce by five-fold the number of anticonformists needed for a population to express its preferences. In dynamic environments where a previously unpopular choice becomes preferred, anticonformists catalyze social tipping and reduce the “cultural lag,” even beyond the role of committed minorities—that is, individuals with a commitment to a specific cause. This research highlights the role of dissenting voices in shaping collective behavior, including their potential to catalyze the adoption of new technologies as they become favorable and to enrich democracy by facilitating the expression of views.