Related papers: Selection and Influence in Cultural Dynamics
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
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 democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
In human societies opinion formation is mediated by social interactions, consequently taking place on a network of relationships and at the same time influencing the structure of the network and its evolution. To investigate this…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
The dissemination of information and the development of public opinion are essential elements of most social media platforms and are often described as distinct, man-made occurrences. However, what is often disregarded is the…
A general model of opinion dynamics is introduced in which each individual's opinion is measured on a bounded continuous spectrum. Each opinion is influenced heterogeneously by every other opinion in the population. It is demonstrated that…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
The occurrence of discrimination is an important problem in the social and economical sciences. Much of the discrimination observed in empirical studies can be explained by the theory of in-group favoritism, which states that people tend to…
In this paper we study collective decision making on a multi-population, represented by a regular network of groups of individuals. Each group consists of a collection of players and every player can choose between two options. A group is…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. Traditional interaction models follow deductive logic: the…
We consider a dynamic network of individuals that may hold one of two different opinions in a two-party society. As a dynamical model, agents can endlessly create and delete links to satisfy a preferred degree, and the network is shaped by…
We present the result of a dual modeling of opinion network. The model complements the agent-based opinion models by attaching to the social agent (voters) network a political opinion (party) network having its own intrinsic mechanisms of…
Two main procedures characterize the way in which social actors evaluate the qualities of the options in decision-making processes: they either seek to evaluate their intrinsic qualities (individual learners), or they rely on the opinion of…
We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…