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This paper develops some mathematical models arising in behavioral sciences, particularly in psychology, which are formalized via general preferences with variable ordering structures. Our considerations are based on the recent variational…
Research on how humans perceive aesthetics in shapes, colours, and music has predominantly focused on Western populations, limiting our understanding of how cultural environments shape aesthetic preferences. We present a large-scale…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…
Motivated by Breiman's rousing 2001 paper on the "two cultures" in statistics, we consider the role that different modeling approaches play in causal inference. We discuss the relationship between model complexity and causal…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behavior of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent…
We present a rational analysis of curiosity, proposing that people's curiosity is driven by seeking stimuli that maximize their ability to make appropriate responses in the future. This perspective offers a way to unify previous theories of…
Psychosocial constructs can only be assessed indirectly, and measures are typically formed by a combination of indicators that are thought to relate to the construct. Reflective and formative measurement models offer different…
Why do some national music markets sustain a rich musical diversity whereas others converge on mostly formulaic output? The existing models of cultural consumption (superstar economics, rational addiction, Bayesian social learning) each…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
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'…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
The general use of subjective probabilities to model belief has been justified using many axiomatic schemes. For example, ?consistent betting behavior' arguments are well-known. To those not already convinced of the unique fitness and…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) must resolve conflicts when different modalities provide contradictory information, a process we term modality following. Prior work measured this behavior only with coarse dataset-level statistics,…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Nontransitive choices have long been an area of curiosity within economics. However, determining whether nontransitive choices represent an individual's preference is a difficult task since choice data is inherently stochastic. This paper…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
Despite the tremendous advancements in the field of network theory, very few studies have taken weights in the interactions into consideration that emerge naturally in all real world systems. Using random matrix analysis of a weighted…