Related papers: Selection and Influence in Cultural Dynamics

A general model for opinion formation and competition, like in ideological struggles is formulated. The underlying set is a closed one, like a country but in which the population size is variable in time. Several ideologies compete to…

Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…

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.…

Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…

We investigate the collective behavior of a system of social agents subject to the competition between two mass media influences considered as external fields. We study under what conditions either of two mass media with different…

Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…

We recently proposed a model coupling the evolution of the opinions of the individual with the local network topology. The opinion dynamics is based on the Bounded Confidence model. The social networks is based on a group concept where each…

Prosocial behaviors are encountered in the donation game, the prisoner's dilemma, relaxed social dilemmas, and public goods games. Many studies assume that the population structure is homogeneous, meaning all individuals have the same…

Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…

An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…

We study the mutual influence of authority and persuasion in the flow of opinion. Many social organizations are characterized by a hierarchical structure where the propagation of opinion is asymmetric. In the normal flow of opinion…

The Axelrod model is a spatial stochastic model for the dynamics of cultures which, similarly to the voter model, includes social influence, but differs from the latter by also accounting for another social factor called homophily, the…

The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…

Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…

Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural change. For decades, researchers in the social and natural…

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…

A recently proposed model of social interaction in voting is investigated by simplifying it down into a version that is more analytically tractable and which allows a mathematical analysis to be performed. This analysis clarifies the…

Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…