Related papers: A bare-bones mathematical model of radicalization
Potential violent criminals will often need to go through a sequence of preparatory steps before they can execute their plans. During this escalation process police have the opportunity to evaluate the threat posed by such people through…
We investigate the emergence of extreme opinion trends in society by employing statistical physics modeling and analysis on polls that inquire about a wide range of issues such as religion, economics, politics, abortion, extramarital sex,…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
Moral Foundations Theory proposes that individuals with conflicting political views base their behavior on different principles chosen from a small group of universal moral foundations. This study proposes using a set of widely accepted…
Terrorist organizations change over time because of processes such as recruitment and training as well as counter-terrorism (CT) measures, but the effects of these processes are typically studied qualitatively and in separation from each…
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately…
We study the conditions of propagation of an initial emergent practice qualified as extremist within a population adept at a practice perceived as moderate, whether political, societal or religious. The extremist practice is carried by an…
The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is…
Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the…
We present a toy model of opinion spreading in a society which combines a self-reinforcing mechanism with diffusion. The relative strength of these two mechanisms - called the affectability of the system - is a free parameter of the model.…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question poses considerable methodological challenges. Survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is…
The rise of conspiracy theories has created far-reaching societal harm in the public discourse by eroding trust and fueling polarization. Beyond this public impact lies a deeply personal toll on the friends and families of conspiracy…
Epidemiological models describe the spread of an infectious disease within a population. They capture microscopic details on how the disease is passed on among individuals in various different ways, while making predictions about the state…
Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State) -- even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
Terrorist network is a paradigms to understand the terrorism. The terrorist involves a lot of people, and among them are involved as perpetrators, but on the contrary it is very difficult to know who they are caused by lack of information.…
Religions are among the most consequential social institutions, shaping collective identities, moral norms, and political organization across societies and historical periods. Nevertheless, despite extensive scholarship describing…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and…