Related papers: Polarization and Fluctuations in Signed Social Net…
Currently used models of opinion formation use random initial conditions. In reality, most people in a social network, except for a small fraction of the population, are initially either unaware of, or indifferent to, the disputed issue. To…
Digital networks have profoundly transformed the ways in which individuals interact, exchange information, and establish connections, leading to the emergence of phenomena such as virality, misinformation cascades, and online polarization.…
In this work we study the opinion evolution in a community-based population with intergroup interactions. We address two issues. First, we consider that such intergroup interactions can be negative with some probability $p$. We develop a…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
Recent technological changes have increased connectivity between individuals around the world leading to higher frequency interactions between members of communities that would be otherwise distant and disconnected. This paper examines a…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
We propose the PageRank model of opinion formation and investigate its rich properties on real directed networks of Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, LiveJournal and Twitter. In this model the opinion formation of linked electors is…
Nowadays, we live in a society where people often form their opinion by accessing and discussing contents shared on social networking websites. While these platforms have fostered information access and diffusion, they represent optimal…
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…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing…
We propose a model for social dynamics on a network. In this model each actor holds a position on some issue, actors and their opinions being associated to vertices of the graph, and, additionally, the actors hold opinions of one another,…
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically…
Recently, a continuous dynamics was proposed to simulate dynamics of interpersonal relations in a society represented by a fully connected graph. Final state of such a society was found to be identical with the so-called Heider balance…
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.…
Polarization of societies is getting more and more attention from researchers working at the intersection of many fields, because it seems to be a defining feature of many public domains. In this paper, we are going to investigate how the…
We describe a model for polarization in multi-agent systems based on Esteban and Ray's standard family of polarization measures from economics. Agents evolve by updating their beliefs (opinions) based on an underlying influence graph, as in…
Social networks are often permeated by agents who promote their opinions without allowing for their own mind to be changed: Understanding how these so-called `zealots' act to increase the prevalence of their promoted opinion over the…
The structure of a network can significantly influence the properties of the dynamical processes which take place on them. While many studies have been devoted to this influence, much less attention has been devoted to the interplay and…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…