Related papers: Quantifying time-dependent Media Agenda and Public…
Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…
The dynamics of popularity in online media are driven by a combination of endogenous spreading mechanisms and response to exogenous shocks including news and events. However, little is known about the dependence of temporal patterns of…
Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its…
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as #instantlyinlove?…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Social dialogue, the foundation of our democracies, is currently threatened by disinformation and partisanship, with their disrupting role on individual and collective awareness and detrimental effects on decision-making processes. Despite…
We address formally the problem of opinion dynamics when the agents of a social network (e.g., consumers) are not only influenced by their neighbors but also by an external influential entity referred to as a marketer. The influential…
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is…
We study an opinion formation model that takes into account that individuals have diverse preferences when forming their opinion regarding a particular issue. We show that the system exhibits a phenomenon called "diversity-induced…
How political beliefs change in accordance with media exposure is a complicated matter. Some studies have been able to demonstrate that groups with different media diets in the aggregate (e.g., U.S. media consumers ingesting partisan news)…
Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be…
A key question of collective social behavior is related to the influence of Mass Media on public opinion. Different approaches have been developed to address quantitatively this issue, ranging from field experiments to mathematical models.…
Modern information environments, especially social media, are highly complex systems that exceed individual processing capacities such as humans' limited attention. This environment/cognition mismatch can increase susceptibility to…
Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
This work aims at emphasizing a number of questions that, although crucial since the early days of media studies, have not yet been the object of the empirical and computational study that they deserve: How does collective attention…
In modern financial markets, news plays a critical role in shaping investor sentiment and influencing stock price movements. However, most existing studies aggregate daily news sentiment into a single score, potentially overlooking…
An important aspect that must be considered when studying opinion formation phenomena is the different social attitude of the agents taking part in the process. Different kinds of interconnections and of interacting behaviours should be…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…