Related papers: Finite-time influence systems and the Wisdom of Cr…
Collective intelligence, which aggregates the shared information from large crowds, is often negatively impacted by unreliable information sources with the low quality data. This becomes a barrier to the effective use of collective…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
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 investigate a dynamical model of opinion formation in which an individual's opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of other agents. We introduce a bias towards one of the opinions in a manner not considered earlier to the…
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model, called unified model, which naturally unifies the ideas of social influence, collaborative filtering and content-based methods for item recommendation. To address the issue of…
Sentiment Analysis of microblog feeds has attracted considerable interest in recent times. Most of the current work focuses on tweet sentiment classification. But not much work has been done to explore how reliable the opinions of the mass…
Discovering the antecedents of individuals' influence in collaborative environments is an important, practical, and challenging problem. In this paper, we study interpersonal influence in small groups of individuals who collectively execute…
What are the mechanisms by which groups with certain opinions gain public voice and force others holding a different view into silence? And how does social media play into this? Drawing on recent neuro-scientific insights into the…
The formation of opinions in a large population is governed by endogenous (human interactions) and exogenous (media influence) factors. In the analysis of opinion evolution in a large population, decision making rules can be approximated…
The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only…
Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Learning from the crowd has become increasingly popular in the Web and social media. There is a wide variety of crowdlearning sites in which, on the one hand, users learn from the knowledge that other users contribute to the site, and, on…
How communities respond to diverse societal challenges, from economic crises to political upheavals, is shaped by their collective minds - shared representations of ongoing events and current topics. In turn, collective minds are shaped by…
We study binary opinion formation in a large population where individuals are influenced by the opinions of other individuals. The population is characterised by the existence of (i) communities where individuals share some similar…
Does talking to others make people more accurate or less accurate on numeric estimates such as quantitative evaluations or probabilistic forecasts? Research on peer-to-peer communication suggests that discussion between people will usually…
Investigation of social influence dynamics requires mathematical models that are "simple" enough to admit rigorous analysis, and yet sufficiently "rich" to capture salient features of social groups. Thus, the mechanism of iterative opinion…
Following the Bayesian communication learning paradigm, we propose a finite population learning concept to capture the level of information aggregation in any given network, where agents are allowed to communicate with neighbors repeatedly…
This study investigates how the majority group influences individual judgment formation and expression in anonymous, spontaneous online conversations. Drawing on theories of social conformity and anti-conformity, we analyze everyday…
Evidence shows that in a significant number of cases the current methods of research do not allow for reproducible and falsifiable procedures of scientific investigation. As a consequence, the majority of critical decisions at all levels,…