Related papers: The amplification of risk in experimental diffusio…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…
The rapid growth of e-commerce has made people accustomed to shopping online. Before making purchases on e-commerce websites, most consumers tend to rely on rating scores and review information to make purchase decisions. With this…
Epidemic disease spreading is conventionally often modelled and analyzed by means of rate and diffusion equations, following the paradigms of well-controlled chemical reactions and diffusive dynamics in a test tube. Yet, serious worries…
Social media has emerged as a significant source of information for people. As agents interact with each other through social media platforms, they create numerous complex social networks. Within these networks, information spread among…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
Panic may spread over a crowd in a similar fashion as contagious diseases do in social groups. People no exposed to a panic source may express fear, alerting others of imminent danger. This social mechanism initiates an evacuation process,…
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…
We present a cognitive model of opinion dynamics which studies the behavior of a population of interacting individuals in the context of risk of natural disaster. In particular, we investigate the response of the individuals to the…
We present and analyze a mathematical model to study the feedback between behavior and epidemic spread in a population that is actively assessing and reacting to risk of infection. In our model, a population dynamically forms an opinion…
Recent empirical studies have confirmed the key roles of complex contagion mechanisms such as memory, social reinforcement, and decay effects in information diffusion and behaviour spreading. Inspired by this fact, we here propose a new…
The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help a person potentially in need if there are others present. Sociologists and psychologists have proposed multiple plausible reasons for the…
A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e.…
Risk perception plays a key role in shaping the collective behavior of moving animal groups, yet the effects of variation in perceived risk within groups is unknown. Here, we merge two subgroups of fish with different levels of perceived…
Since the information available is fundamental for our perceptions and opinions, we are interested in understanding the conditions allowing for a good information to be disseminated. This paper explores opinion dynamics by means of…
Recurrent waves which are often observed during long pandemics typically form as a result of several interrelated dynamics including public health interventions, population mobility and behaviour, varying disease transmissibility due to…
This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to…
In the early stage of epidemics, individuals' determination on adopting protective measures, which can reduce their risk of infection and suppress disease spreading, is likely to depend on multiple information sources and their mutual…
Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions--the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations--can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs…