Related papers: Negative response to an excessive bias by a mixed …

Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…

We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…

We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

This paper proposes a dual opinions co-evolution model based on the dual attitudes theory in social psychology, where every individual has dual opinions of an object: implicit and explicit opinions. The implicit opinions are individuals'…

Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…

We designed and ran an experiment to test how often people's choices are reversed by others' recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In our experiment participants were first asked to provide…

We propose a model for diffusion of two opposite opinions. Here, the decision to be taken by each individual is a random variable which depends on the tendency of the population, as well on its own trend characteristic. The influence of the…

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…

We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…

We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…

We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…

We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…

Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…

Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…

We investigate opinion dynamics in multi-agent networks when a bias toward one of two possible opinions exists; for example, reflecting a status quo vs a superior alternative. Starting with all agents sharing an initial opinion representing…

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…

We present a model of interacting multiple choices of opinions. At each step of the process, a listener is persuaded by his/her neighbour, the lobbyist, to modify his/her opinion on two different choices of event. Whether or not the…

We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…

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…