Related papers: Competing Activists--Political Polarization
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…
We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by…
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.…
In social networks, it is often of interest to identify the most influential users who can successfully spread information to others. This is particularly important for marketing (e.g., targeting influencers for a marketing campaign) and to…
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…
When can an interest group exploit polarization between political parties to its advantage? Building upon Battaglini and Patacchini (2018), we study a model where an interest group credibly promises payments to legislators conditional on…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
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…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
We provide an agent-based model to explain the emergence of collective opinions not based on feedback between different opinions, but based on emotional interactions between agents. The driving variable is the emotional state of agents,…
In recent months the figure of Greta Thunberg and the theme of climate changings quickly became the focus of the debate. This has lead to a polarization effect in opinion forming about the climate subject. Starting from the analysis of this…
We say that a population is perfectly polarized when divided in two groups of the same size and opposite opinions. In this paper, we propose a methodology to study and measure the emergence of polarization from social interactions. We begin…
Since the advent of the internet, communication paradigms have continuously evolved, resulting in a present-day landscape where the dynamics of information dissemination have undergone a complete transformation compared to the past. In this…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
In this work we study opinion formation on a fully-connected population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices, where the agents may adopt three different attitudes (favorable to either one choice or to the other, or…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…