Postdoctoral Position in Psychological Sciences – Digital Resilience and Socio-Cognitive Adaptation

Descrizione

Postdoctoral Position in Psychological Sciences – Digital Resilience and Socio-Cognitive Adaptation Sintesi in italiano (traduzione automatica): L'organizzazione internazionale PEPR NumEco offre una posizione di ricercatore post-dottorato nel campo delle scienze psicologiche, focalizzandosi sulla resilienza digitale e sull'adattamento socio-cognitivo. La sede del progetto è in Francia, presso il CEA di Grenoble. Il candidato selezionato si occuperà di analizzare come individui e gruppi percepiscono e si adattano a servizi digitali degradati, con particolare attenzione agli aspetti cognitivi e sociali della resilienza. È richiesta una laurea in psicologia o un campo correlato, con esperienza in psicologia sperimentale e progettazione di interventi per la resilienza psicologica. Il lavoro prevede anche l'analisi di contesti reali di crisi per identificare criteri e indicatori psicologici che supportano l'adattamento funzionale in situazioni di difficoltà. Digital technologies are now ubiquitous in modern infrastructures, within a context of increasing demand and growing complexity of the underlying components. As a result, digital failures can have major consequences, not only for the internet and data centers, but also for transportation systems, energy supply, and more broadly for the functioning of society. It is therefore crucial to design systems capable of ensuring continued access to essential services, even when the overall infrastructure is operating in a degraded mode. This is the objective of the PEPR NumEco ( https://pepr-numeco.fr/ ), which embeds this requirement for resilience within an eco-responsible framework, where the digital transition is conceived as a lever for ecological transition and where flexibility in the use of digital technologies represents a key challenge. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to absorb shocks and stressors, to adapt to disruptions, and to recover rapidly after a perturbation. It is classically organized into four domains—physical, informational, cognitive, and societal—and thus constitutes a transdisciplinary object at the interface between engineering and the understanding of psychosocial mechanisms within the social sciences and humanities. The present position is situated precisely at this interface, within the SHS domain, using digital services provided by a data center as a case study (see more specifically PC5 – Pathways). In this context, the mission aims to characterize, measure, and strengthen the psychosocial dimension of digital resilience, i.e., how individuals and groups perceive, make decisions, and adapt in response to degraded or rationed digital services, particularly in contexts of energy constraint. The postdoctoral researcher will focus on the cognitive and societal domains of resilience (psychological resilience understood as the interaction between behavior, cognition, and affect in a given context and at a given time), in close articulation with the technical criteria (physical and informational domains) developed by project partners in electronics and computer science (CEA Grenoble, France). The project is embedded in the chain: “degraded digital service → user experience → cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses → effects on the collective stability of the infrastructure.” Building on experimental psychology and more specifically approaches used in psychological resilience intervention design, the work will consist in identifying relevant user populations, specifying the processes through which they adapt—or seek to adapt—to adversity (outages, degraded modes, energy crises), depending on usage contexts (work, leisure, etc.) and temporal factors (day/night, seasonal variations). It will further aim to describe how such resilience can be measured and improved as a dynamic process. To ground this analysis in real-world situations, the research will draw on contexts where degraded modes already exist (e.g., structural electricity shortages in South Africa, prolonged infrastructure failure in Lebanon, and the functioning of digital systems in Ukraine since 2022) as sources of empirical inspiration for resilience analysis. Comparing these contexts will help distinguish what is attributable to adversity itself from what depends on its nature (rationing, economic collapse, conflict), and will allow the extraction of transferable dimensions and hypotheses for the project’s use case. The overall objective is to identify psychosocial criteria and indicators that support functional adaptation, while anticipating potentially harmful collective dynamics—i.e., decisions that may trigger undesirable cascading effects on infrastructure functioning. Finally, the work will maintain a reflexive stance on the purpose of resilience itself: resilience for technical stability and/or for preserving individuals’ access and agency. Responsibilities The position is structured around three phases of the project: 1) D Annuncio in inglese. Fonte: Eur