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Social categorizations divide people into "us" and "them," often along continuous attributes such as political ideology or skin color. This division results in both positive consequences, such as a sense of community, and negative ones,…
We study molecular dynamics within populations of diffusively coupled cells under the assumption of fast diffusive exchange. As a technical tool, we propose conditions on boundedness and ultimate boundedness for systems with a singular…
We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information-theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately,…
We present a model that takes into account the coupling between evolutionary game dynamics and social influence. Importantly, social influence and game dynamics take place in different domains, which we model as different layers of a…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
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,…
For decades, researchers have been trying to understand how people form their opinions. This quest has become even more pressing with the widespread usage of online social networks and social media, which seem to amplify the already…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
For a binary choice problem, the spatial coordination of decisions in an agent community is investigated both analytically and by means of stochastic computer simulations. The individual decisions are based on different local information…
We study a nonlinear bounded-confidence model (BCM) of continuous-time opinion dynamics on networks with both persuadable individuals and zealots. The model is parameterized by a scalar $\gamma$, which controls the steepness of a smooth…
Graph representation learning has become a prominent tool for the characterization and understanding of the structure of networks in general and social networks in particular. Typically, these representation learning approaches embed the…
Polarization significantly influences societal divisions across economic, political, religious, and ideological lines. Understanding these mechanisms is key to devising strategies to mitigate such divisions and promote depolarization. Our…
We propose a causal predictive framework for estimating risk under preventative interventions. The Unexposed Mediator Model maintains mediators that are also predictors at their unexposed level, removing double counting of intervention…
This paper analyzes a society composed of individuals who have diverse sets of beliefs (or models) and diverse tastes (or utility functions). It characterizes the model selection process of a social planner who wishes to aggregate…
We investigate disagreement and polarization in a social network with two polarizing sources of information. First, we define disagreement and polarization indices in two-party leader-follower models of opinion dynamics. We then give…
In experimental applications of bounded-reasoning models, behavior is often summarized by distributions of "levels". We argue that such summaries conflate two conceptually distinct dimensions: a player's type, capturing beliefs about what…
We analyze a mathematical model to understand the dynamics of bullying in schools. The model considers a population divided into four groups: susceptible individuals, bullies, individuals exposed to bullying, and violent individuals.…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
Understanding human behavior from observed data is critical for transparency and accountability in decision-making. Consider real-world settings such as healthcare, in which modeling a decision-maker's policy is challenging -- with no…