Related papers: Scientific Polarization
We consider a social learning problem, where a network of agents is interested in selecting one among a finite number of hypotheses. We focus on weakly-connected graphs where the network is partitioned into a sending part and a receiving…
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…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies. Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote opinion…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…
Social media has emerged as a significant source of information for people. As agents interact with each other through social media platforms, they create numerous complex social networks. Within these networks, information spread among…
The increasing polarization in democratic societies is an emergent outcome of political opinion dynamics. Yet, the fundamental mechanisms behind the formation of political opinions, from individual beliefs to collective consensus, remain…
Models of the convergence of opinion in social systems have been the subject of a considerable amount of recent attention in the physics literature. These models divide into two classes, those in which individuals form their beliefs based…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
We introduce a two-variable model to describe spatial polarization, radicalization, and conflict. Individuals in the model harbor a continuous belief variable as well as a discrete radicalization level expressing their tolerance to…
Experts in a population hold (a) beliefs over a state (call these state beliefs), as well as (b) beliefs over the distribution of beliefs in the population (call these hypothetical beliefs). If these are generated via updating a common…
Public opinion on environmental issues remains polarized in many countries, posing a significant barrier to the implementation of effective policies. Behind this polarization, empirical studies have identified social susceptibility,…
When collaborating with multiple parties, communicating relevant information is of utmost importance to efficiently completing the tasks at hand. Under active inference, communication can be cast as sharing beliefs between free-energy…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
Many mechanisms behind the evolution of cooperation, such as reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and altruistic punishment, require group knowledge of individual actions. But what keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Conformist…
With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility.…
We performed a massive study of the dynamics of group deliberation among several websites containing millions of opinions on topics ranging from books to media. Contrary to the common phenomenon of group polarization observed offline, we…