Related papers: Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization
We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change…
We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a "dissenting" opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people,…
We investigate the problem of truth discovery based on opinions from multiple agents who may be unreliable or biased. We consider the case where agents' reliabilities or biases are correlated if they belong to the same community, which…
Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
Some political strategies to win elections over the last years were based heavily on fomenting general distrust in information institutions and favoring distrustful sources. The misinformation pandemic has the straightforward consequence…
In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use…
Consider the following belief change/merging scenario. A group of information sources gives a sequence of reports about the state of the world at various instances (e.g. different points in time). The true states at these instances are…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…
This work studies the learning abilities of agents sharing partial beliefs over social networks. The agents observe data that could have risen from one of several hypotheses and interact locally to decide whether the observations they are…
Though a lot of work in multi-agent systems is focused on reasoning about knowledge and beliefs of artificial agents, an explicit representation and reasoning about the presence/absence of agents, especially in the scenarios where agents…
Causality is an important concept both for proving impossibility results and for synthesizing efficient protocols in distributed computing. For asynchronous agents communicating over unreliable channels, causality is well studied and…