Related papers: Public Discourse in the Web Does Not Exhibit Group…
Affective polarization, the emotional divide characterized by in-group love (trust towards fellow partisans) and out-group hate (mistrust towards those with opposite political views), has become prevalent in the current society. Despite its…
We often treat social media as a lens onto society. How might that lens distort the popularity of political and social viewpoints? We examine discrepancies between publicly posted and privately surveyed opinions within communities,…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
A polarized social network is modeled as a system of interacting marked point processes with memory of variable length. Each point process indicates the successive times in which a social actor expresses a "favorable" or "contrary" opinion.…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of…
Networks, representing attitudinal survey data, expose the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine…
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the…
Affective polarization, characterized by increased negativity and hostility towards opposing groups, has become a prominent feature of political discourse worldwide. Our study examines the presence of this type of polarization in a…
We explore a method to influence or even control the diversity of opinions within a polarised social group. We leverage the voter model in which users hold binary opinions and repeatedly update their beliefs based on others they connect…
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play…
Citizen-generated counter speech is a promising way to fight hate speech and promote peaceful, non-polarized discourse. However, there is a lack of large-scale longitudinal studies of its effectiveness for reducing hate speech. To this end,…
Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…
We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
If you search for 'collective behaviour' with your web browser most of the texts popping up will be about group activities of humans, including riots, fashion and mass panic. Nevertheless, collective behaviour is also considered to be an…
Opinion dynamics is of paramount importance as it provides insights into the complex dynamics of opinion propagation and social relationship adjustment. It is assumed in most of the previous works that social relationships evolve much…