Related papers: Quantifying the effects of social influence
We investigate inferring individual preferences and the contradiction of individual preferences with group preferences through direct measurement of the brain. We report an experiment where brain activity collected from 31 participants…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…
When opinions, behaviors or ideas diffuse within a population, some are invariably stickier than others. The stickier the opinion, behavior or idea, the greater is an individual's inertia to replace it with an alternative. Here we study the…
Increasingly, people use social media for their day-to-day interactions and as a source of information, even though much of this information is practically anonymous. This raises the question: does anonymous information influence its…
In decision making tasks under uncertainty, humans display characteristic biases in seeking, integrating, and acting upon information relevant to the task. Here, we reexamine data from previous carefully designed experiments, collected at…
Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…
With the advent of online networks, societies are substantially more connected with individual members able to easily modify and maintain their own social links. Here, we show that active network maintenance exposes agents to confirmation…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…
Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as…
With the rapid growth of online social media, people become increasingly overwhelmed by the volume and the content of the information present in the environment. The threshold model is currently one of the most common methods to capture the…
The problem of individualization is recognized as crucial in almost every field. Identifying causes of effects in specific events is likewise essential for accurate decision making. However, such estimates invoke counterfactual…
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.…
Observation of other people's choices can provide useful information in many circumstances. However, individuals may not utilize this information efficiently, i.e., they may make decision-making errors in social interactions. In this paper,…
The wisdom of crowds is the idea that the combination of independent estimates of the magnitude of some quantity yields a remarkably accurate prediction, which is always more accurate than the average individual estimate. In addition, it is…
Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…
We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular, we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social psychology as it…
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…
Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is…