Related papers: Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
We study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
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…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…
We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and…
We introduce an epistemic information measure between two data streams, that we term $influence$. Closely related to transfer entropy, the measure must be estimated by epistemic agents with finite memory resources via sampling accessible…
It has been observed people tend to have opinions that are far more internally consistent than it would be reasonable to expect. Here, we study how that observation might emerge from changing how agents trust the opinions of their peers in…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
From marketing to politics, exploitation of incomplete information through selective communication of arguments is ubiquitous. In this work, we focus on development of an argumentation-theoretic model for manipulable multi-agent…
This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…
Reasoning about observed effects and their causes is important in multi-agent contexts. While there has been much work on causality from an objective standpoint, causality from the point of view of some particular agent has received much…
Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are…
We study an extension of the voter model in which each agent is endowed with an innate preference for one of two states that we term as "truth" or "falsehood". Due to interactions with neighbors, an agent that innately prefers truth can be…
An evolving population, in which individual members (`agents') adapt their behaviour according to past experience, is of central importance to many disciplines. Because of their limited knowledge and capabilities, agents are forced to make…
Political actors form coalitions around their joint normative beliefs in order to influence the policy process on contentious issues such as climate change or population ageing. Policy process theory maintains that learning within and…