Related papers: Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
Our belief systems are shaped by social processes, such as observations and influence, and by cognitive processes, such as the drive for internal coherence. These processes steer how individual beliefs evolve and become connected. The…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…
Polarization and unexpected correlations between opinions on diverse topics (including in politics, culture and consumer choices) are an object of sustained attention. However, numerous theoretical models do not seem to convincingly explain…
We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…
We develop a model of opinion dynamics where agents in a social network seek to learn a ground truth among a set of competing hypotheses. Agents in the network form private beliefs about such hypotheses by aggregating their neighbors'…
This work addresses the problem of sharing partial information within social learning strategies. In traditional social learning, agents solve a distributed multiple hypothesis testing problem by performing two operations at each instant:…
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…
The arise of disagreement is an emergent phenomenon that can be observed within a growing social group and, beyond a certain threshold, can lead to group fragmentation. To better understand how disagreement emerges, we introduce an…
In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of information spread, grounded on psychological insights on the formation and spread of beliefs. In our model, we consider a network of individuals who share two opposing types of information…
This paper presents an extension of temporal epistemic logic with operators that quantify over agent strategies. Unlike previous work on alternating temporal epistemic logic, the semantics works with systems whose states explicitly encode…
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 develop a logical framework for reasoning about knowledge and evidence in which the agent may be uncertain about how to interpret their evidence. Rather than representing an evidential state as a fixed subset of the state space, our…
Through a series of examples, we illustrate some important drawbacks that the action logic framework suffers from in its ability to represent the dynamics of information updates. We argue that these problems stem from the fact that the…
We use a novel type of epistemic logic, employing comparative knowledge assertions, to analyze the relative epistemic powers of individuals or groups of agents. Such comparative assertions can express that a group has the potential to…
Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else…
Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…