Related papers: Structural balance and opinion separation in trust…
This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the interplay between decentralization -- a prevalent character of multi-agent systems -- and centralization, i.e., the task of imposing central control to meet system-level goals. In…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…
Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…
The central problems in social sciences concern the social and psychological mechanisms and conditions required for the emergence and stability of human groups. The present article is dedicated to the problem of stability of human groups.…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…
Schelling segregation is a well-established model used to investigate the dynamics of segregation in agent-based models. Since we consider segregation to be key for the development of political polarisation, we are interested in what…
We generalize the classic multi-agent DeGroot model for opinion dynamics to incorporate the Spiral of Silence theory from political science. This theory states that individuals may withhold their opinions when they perceive them to be in…
Models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence show a sharp transition between a consensus and a polarization phase at a critical global bound of confidence. In this paper, heterogeneous bounds of confidence are studied. The…
The study of social networks is a burgeoning research area. However, most existing work deals with networks that simply encode whether relationships exist or not. In contrast, relationships in signed networks can be positive ("like",…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
We study how the stubbornness of social network users influences opinion polarization and disagreement. Our work is in the context of the popular Friedkin-Johnson opinion formation model, where users update their opinion as a function of…
We study the evolution of opinions on a directed network with community structure. Individuals update their opinions synchronously based on a weighted average of their neighbors' opinions, their own previous opinions, and external media…
Investigation of social influence dynamics requires mathematical models that are "simple" enough to admit rigorous analysis, and yet sufficiently "rich" to capture salient features of social groups. Thus, the mechanism of iterative opinion…
Polarization, understood as a division into mutually hostile groups, is a common feature of social systems. It is studied in Structural Balance Theory (SBT) in terms of semicycles in signed networks. However, enumerating semicycles is…
This paper investigates how interacting agents arrive to a consensus or a polarized state. We study the opinion formation process under the effect of a global steering mechanism (GSM), which aggregates the opinion-driven stochastic agent…
In this paper, we propose a Boltzmann-type kinetic description of opinion formation on social networks, which takes into account a general connectivity distribution of the individuals. We consider opinion exchange processes inspired by the…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
We study the pairwise bounded confidence model on scale-free networks where new agents regularly arrive over time. The probability that arriving agents form links to preexisting ones depends on both agent degree and opinion proximity. In…