Sonja Belkin graduated from the London School of Economics, where she studied the BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. Her dissertation, supervised by Jens Koed Madsen, used agent-based modelling to explore how issue polarisation can emerge through recommender systems, even among rational Bayesians. Alongside her degree, she was President of LSE's Behavioural and Psychological Science Society, where she helped launch the UK's first inter-university Behavioural Science Careers Fair and co-founded LSE's student psychology journal, Irrationale. An interest in real-world applications of behavioural science also led her to found LSE's student behavioural science consultancy, which advised charities like One for the World, and intern/freelance for BeHive, Innovia Technology, Basis Social, and DecTech. Sonja's MPhil, co-supervised by Lee De Wit and David Young, is focussed on understanding why we observe greater belief polarisation for social policy issues compared to economic ones, using Bayesian belief networks.
