Related papers: Social Effects in Science: Modelling Agents for a …

Quantitative social science is not only about regression analysis or, in general, data inference. Computer simulations of social mechanisms have a 60-year long history. They have been used for many different purposes -- to test scenarios,…

Recent years saw an increased interest in modeling and understanding the mechanisms of opinion and innovation spread through human networks. Using analysis of real-world social data, researchers are able to gain a better understanding of…

Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…

Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…

Interpersonal influence estimation from empirical data is a central challenge in the study of social structures and dynamics. Opinion dynamics theory is a young interdisciplinary science that studies opinion formation in social networks and…

We briefly introduce a new promising field of applications of statistical physics, opinion dynamics, where the systems at study are social groups or communities and the atoms/spins are the individuals (or agents) belonging to such groups.…

Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…

Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…

Many Artificial Intelligence systems depend on the agent's updating its beliefs about the world on the basis of experience. Experiments constitute one type of experience, so scientific methodology offers a natural environment for examining…

Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else…

Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…

The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…

Influence functions estimate the effect of removing a training point on a model without the need to retrain. They are based on a first-order Taylor approximation that is guaranteed to be accurate for sufficiently small changes to the model,…

Understanding how an individual changes its attitude, belief, and opinion due to other people's social influences is vital because of its wide implications. A core methodology that is used to study the change of attitude under social…

Mathematical models of complex social systems can enrich social scientific theory, inform interventions, and shape policy. From voting behavior to economic inequality and urban development, such models influence decisions that affect…

In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…

For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…

How can we model influence between individuals in a social system, even when the network of interactions is unknown? In this article, we review the literature on the "influence model," which utilizes independent time series to estimate how…

Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of…

Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…