Related papers: The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer
In the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, it is an important problem to predict which individual opinions will eventually dominate in a large population, if there will be a consensus, and how long it takes a consensus to form. This…
In a range of scientific coauthorship networks, transitions emerge in degree distributions, correlations between degrees and local clustering coefficients, etc. The existence of those transitions could be regarded as a result of the…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
Many real-world complex systems rely on cluster synchronization to function properly. A cluster of nodes exhibits synchronous behavior while others behave erratically. Predicting the emergence of these clusters and understanding the…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the emergence of leadership in multi-agent systems is still under investigation in many areas of research where group coordination is involved. While leadership has been mostly investigated in the…
People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…
Cooperation is observed widely in nature and is thought an essential component of many evolutionary processes, yet the mechanisms by which it arises and persists are still unclear. Among several theories, network reciprocity -- a model of…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Social conventions govern countless behaviors all of us engage in every day, from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. But how can shared conventions emerge spontaneously in the absence of a central coordinating authority? The…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Reaching consensus -- a macroscopic state where the system constituents display the same microscopic state -- is a necessity in multiple complex socio-technical and techno-economic systems: their correct functioning ultimately depends on…
The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…
The interactions among human beings represent the backbone of our societies. How people interact, establish new connections, and allocate their activities among these links can reveal a lot of our social organization. Despite focused…
Background: Philosophers of science including Collins, Feyerabend, Kuhn and Latour have all emphasized the importance of consensus within scientific communities of practice. Consensus is important for maintaining legitimacy with outsiders,…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for the social aggregation in…
The community structure of complex networks reveals both their organization and hidden relationships among their constituents. Most community detection methods currently available are not deterministic, and their results typically depend on…