Related papers: Scientific Polarization
This work examines a social learning problem, where dispersed agents connected through a network topology interact locally to form their opinions (beliefs) as regards certain hypotheses of interest. These opinions evolve over time, since…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
We study a communication game between a sender and a receiver. The sender chooses one of her signals about the state of the world (i.e., anecdotes) and communicates to the receiver who takes an action affecting both players. The sender and…
The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs…
In sociological research, the study of macro processes, such as opinion polarization, faces a fundamental problem, the so-called micro-macro problem. To overcome this problem, we combine empirical experimental research on biased argument…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
In opinion dynamics, as in general usage, polarisation is subjective. To understand polarisation, we need to develop more precise methods to measure the agreement in society. This paper presents four mathematical measures of polarisation…
Social networks with positive and negative links often split into two antagonistic factions. Examples of such a split abound: revolutionaries versus an old regime, Republicans versus Democrats, Axis versus Allies during the second world…
In light of increasing recent attention to political polarization, understanding how polarization can arise poses an important theoretical question. While more classical models of opinion dynamics seem poorly equipped to study this…
Opinion formation models typically represent each individual as a single variable. However, in practice each individual holds interconnected beliefs whose internal organization may influence collective outcomes. To explore this dependence,…
Polarization issue is generally subject to ideological polarization and affective polarization. In particular, affective polarization usually accelerates the polarization process and transform social interactions into a zero-sum game. Yet,…
Among different aspects of social networks, dynamics have been proposed to simulate how opinions can be transmitted. In this study, we propose a model that simulates the communication in an online social network, in which the posts are…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
A common assumption in the social learning literature is that agents exchange information in an unselfish manner. In this work, we consider the scenario where a subset of agents aims at driving the network beliefs to the wrong hypothesis.…
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…