Related papers: Segregation in Religion Networks
The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…
When groups compete for members, the resulting dynamics of human social activity may be understandable with simple mathematical models. Here, we apply techniques from dynamical systems and perturbation theory to analyze a theoretical…
The proliferation of media sharing and social networking websites has brought with it vast collections of site-specific user generated content. The result is a Social Networking Divide in which the concepts and structure common across…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…
Information diffusion on social media platforms is often assumed to occur primarily through explicit social connections, such as follower or friend ties. However, information frequently propagates beyond these observable ties -- through…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to 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…
Religious language continues to permeate contemporary discourse, even in ostensibly secular domains such as environmental activism and climate change debates. This paper investigates how explicit and implicit forms of religious language…
A new form of human trafficking has emerged across Chinese borders, where individuals are lured to Southeast Asia with fraudulent job offers and then coerced into operating online scams. Despite its massive economic and human toll, this…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
Our perceptions are shaped by the social networks we are embedded in. Despite the acknowledged influence of close contacts on how we perceive the world, the role of the broader social environment remains opaque. Here, we leverage a unique…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of how beliefs diffuse among members of social networks. We propose an information flow model (IFM) of belief that captures how interactions among members affect the diffusion and eventual…
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of topics,…
People's perceptions about the size of minority groups in social networks can be biased, often showing systematic over- or underestimation. These social perception biases are often attributed to biased cognitive or motivational processes.…
Social media is profoundly changing our society with its unprecedented spreading power. Due to the complexity of human behaviors and the diversity of massive messages, the information spreading dynamics are complicated, and the reported…
We propose, develop, and analyze a mathematical model of intergroup attitudes in a community that is divided between two distinct social groups (which may be distinguished by religion, ethnicity, or some other socially distinguishing…
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication…
Ideas, behaviors, and opinions spread through social networks. If the probability of spreading to a new individual is a non-linear function of the fraction of the individuals' affected neighbors, such a spreading process becomes a "complex…