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Human behavior often exhibit a scheme in which individuals adopt indifferent, neutral, or radical positions on a given topic. The mechanisms leading to community formation are strongly related with social pressure and the topology of the…

(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…

Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of…

The goal of this work is to study an infectious disease spreading in a medium size population occupying a confined environment. For this purpose, we consider a kinetic theory approach to model crowd dynamics in bounded domains and couple it…

Aggregated data in real world recommender applications often feature fat-tailed distributions of the number of times individual items have been rated or favored. We propose a model to simulate such data. The model is mainly based on social…

Ambition and risk-taking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop…

This paper is a first step to chase the ambitious objective of developing a mathmatical theory of living systems. The contents refer modeling large systems of interacting living entities with the aim of describing their collective behaviors…

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…

The aim of this paper is to present an, admittedly somewhat subjective, bird's eye view of the mathematical theory concerning the spread of an infectious disease in a susceptible host population with static structure, culminating in a…

The arise of disagreement is an emergent phenomenon that can be observed within a growing social group and, beyond a certain threshold, can lead to group fragmentation. To better understand how disagreement emerges, we introduce an…

Is homophily in social and economic networks driven by a taste for homogeneity (preferences) or by a higher probability of meeting individuals with similar attributes (opportunity)? This paper studies identification and estimation of an…

Many groups with diverse convictions are interacting online. Interactions in online communities help people to engage each other and enhance understanding across groups. Online communities include multiple sub-communities whose members are…

A better understanding of how support evolves online for undesirable behaviors such as extremism and hate, could help mitigate future harms. Here we show how the highly irregular growth curves of groups supporting two high-profile extremism…

The traditional approach to the quantitative study of segregation is to employ indices that are selected by ``desirable properties''. Here, we detail how information theory underpins entropy-based indices and demonstrate how desirable…

Analysis of temporal network data arising from online interactive social experiments is not possible with standard statistical methods because the assumptions of these models, such as independence of observations, are not satisfied. In this…

In this paper, we present a computational modeling approach for the dynamics of human crowds, where the spreading of an emotion (specifically fear) has an influence on the pedestrians' behavior. Our approach is based on the methods of the…

As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…

Our understanding of the dynamics of complex networked systems has increased significantly in the last two decades. However, most of our knowledge is built upon assuming pairwise relations among the system's components. This is often an…

People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we…

This paper presents the foundational ideas for a new way of modeling social aggregation. Traditional approaches have been using network theory, and the theory of random networks. Under that paradigm, every social agent is represented by a…