Related papers: Selection and Influence in Cultural Dynamics

Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…

Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…

In studies of cultural differentiation, the joint mechanisms of homophily and influence have been able to explain how distinct cultural groups can form. While these mechanisms normally lead to cultural convergence, increased levels of…

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…

We employ an agent-based model for cultural dynamics to investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the collective behavior of a social system. We introduce heterogeneity as a random distribution of defects or imperfections in a…

Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…

Messages conveyed by media act as a major drive in shaping attitudes and inducing opinion shift. On the other hand, individuals are strongly affected by peer pressure while forming their own judgment. We solve a general model of opinion…

There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…

Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…

Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…

Decisions to pursue higher education are not fully explained by economic incentives, with social influence and peer effects playing a crucial, yet dynamically understudied, role. This paper develops a theoretical non-linear dynamics model…

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…

Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…

Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…

Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…

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…

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…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

One widely-existed state --``harmony with diversity" in which individuals freely express various viewpoints to sustain integration of social diversity, but at the same time shared values ensure social coherence, can be considered as the…