Related papers: Quantifying the effects of social influence
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…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
It has been proposed that information sharing, which is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior, plays a critical role in cultivating and maintaining a sense of shared reality. Across three studies, we tested this theory by investigating…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Consider informative selection of a sample from a finite population. Responses are realized as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables with a probability density function (p.d.f.) f, referred to as the…
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…
Crowdsourcing can identify high-quality solutions to problems; however, individual decisions are constrained by cognitive biases. We investigate some of these biases in an experimental model of a question-answering system. In both natural…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…
An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less…
Misinformation -- false or misleading information -- is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and…
Consensus decision-making in social groups strongly depends on communication links that determine to whom individuals send, and from whom they receive, information. Here, we ask how consensus decisions are affected by strategic updating of…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
The provision of information can improve individual judgments but also fail to make group decisions more accurate; if individuals choose to attend to the same information in the same manner, the predictive diversity that enables crowd…
We investigate a dynamical model of opinion formation in which an individual's opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of other agents. We introduce a bias towards one of the opinions in a manner not considered earlier to the…
Traditionally, experimental effects on humans are investigated at the group level. In this work, we present a distributional ``spotlight'' to investigate experimental effects at the individual level. Specifically, we estimate the effects on…
In the process of enacting or introducing a new policy, policymakers frequently consider the population's responses. These considerations are critical for effective governance. There are numerous methods to gauge the ground sentiment from a…