Related papers: The saturation threshold of public opinion: are ag…
Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
We present a model of opinion dynamics in which agents adjust continuous opinions as a result of random binary encounters whenever their difference in opinion is below a given threshold. High thresholds yield convergence of opinions towards…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
We study dynamics of opinion formation in a network of coupled agents. As the network evolves to a steady state, opinions of agents within the same community converge faster than those of other agents. This framework allows us to study how…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
We consider a stochastic, continuous state and time opinion model where each agent's opinion locally interacts with other agents' opinions in the system, and there is also exogenous randomness. The interaction tends to create clusters of…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
In this work we study opinion formation on a fully-connected population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices, where the agents may adopt three different attitudes (favorable to either one choice or to the other, or…
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…
The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multi-agent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness.…
In this work an opinion formation model with heterogeneous agents is proposed. Each agent is supposed to have different power of persuasion, and besides its own level of zealotry, that is, an individual willingness to being convinced by…