Related papers: Conformity in Scientific Networks
Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…
In this paper, we consider a population of individuals who have actions and opinions, which coevolve, mutually influencing one another on a complex network structure. In particular, we formulate a control problem for this social network, in…
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…
When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends -- e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university -- divisions within a social network can sustain different…
Social life clusters into groups held together by ties that also transmit information. When collective problems occur, group members use their ties to discuss what to do and to establish an agreement, to be reached quick enough to prevent…
Two main procedures characterize the way in which social actors evaluate the qualities of the options in decision-making processes: they either seek to evaluate their intrinsic qualities (individual learners), or they rely on the opinion of…
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…
Perceptions of political bias in the media are formed directly, through the independent consumption of the published outputs of a media organization, and indirectly, through observing the collective responses of political allies and…
This article examines the relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship patterns in a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, geographically distributed research center. Two social networks are constructed and compared: a network…
Collective phenomena in systems of interacting agents have helped us understand diverse social, ecological and biological observations. The corresponding explanations are challenged by incorrect information processing. In particular, the…
Reciprocity, or the tendency of individuals to mirror behavior, is a key measure that describes information exchange in a social network. Users in social networks tend to engage in different levels of reciprocal behavior. Differences in…
This paper considers the evolution of a network in a discrete time, stochastic setting in which agents learn about each other through repeated interactions and maintain/break links on the basis of what they learn from these interactions.…
Understanding how reliable information emerges in interconnected populations is a challenge in social science, network theory and data analysis. Many existing approaches model treat truth as an external reference or a property of individual…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
Opinion leaders are ubiquitous in both online and offline social networks, but the impacts of opinion leaders on social behavior contagions are still not fully understood, especially by using a mathematical model. Here we generalize the…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
Research in network science has shown that many naturally occurring and technologically constructed networks are scale free, that means a power law degree distribution emerges from a growth model in which each new node attaches to the…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
Thanks to the widespread availability of large-scale datasets on scholarly outputs, science itself has come under the microscope with the aim of capturing a quantitative understanding of its workings. In this study, we leverage…
Cognitive biases are often attributed to heuristics or limited information. Yet the structure of social networks is a key, often-overlooked source of perceptual bias. When information passes through social connections, the network alone can…