Related papers: Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Reinforcement: …
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
A method for studying exact properties of a class of {\it inhomogeneous} stochastic many-body systems is developed and presented in the framework of a voter model perturbed by the presence of a ``zealot'', an individual allowed to favour an…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
We introduce and analyze a voter-type model on a two-layer multiplex network, where the presence of a state on one layer acts as a catalyst or inhibitor to the propagation of that state on the other layer. Despite the model's simplicity,…
In this paper, we discuss the possible generalizations of the Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility (SIRM) model developed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 158701 (2014). Although the SIRM model worked approximately satisfying when US election…
We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…
In the coevolving voter model, each voter has one of two diametrically opposite opinions, and a voter encountering a neighbor with the opposite opinion may either adopt it or rewire the connection to another randomly chosen voter sharing…
Brexit and its implications are an ongoing topic of interest since the Brexit referendum in 2016. In 2019 the House of commons held a number of "indicative" and "meaningful" votes as part of the Brexit approval process. The voting behaviour…
Models of opinion dynamics describe how opinions are shaped in various environments. While these models are able to replicate general opinion distributions observed in real-world scenarios, their capacity to align with data at the user…
We study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen, et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
Despite echo chambers in social media have been under considerable scrutiny, general models for their detection and analysis are missing. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a probabilistic generative model that explains…
The adaptive voter model has been widely studied as a conceptual model for opinion formation processes on time-evolving social networks. Past studies on the effect of zealots, i.e. nodes aiming to spread their fixed opinion throughout the…
We model an electorate voting on the funding of a public good in a two-party system in an evolutionary game theory framework. Voters adopt one of four strategies: Consensus-makers, Gridlockers, Party 1 Zealots, and Party 2 Zealots, which…
With the availability of cell phones, internet, social media etc. the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased drastically over the past three decades. Across the same timespan, we are observing the phenomenon of…
The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
For the voter model, we study the effect of a memory-dependent transition rate. We assume that the transition of a spin into the opposite state decreases with the time it has been in its current state. Counter-intuitively, we find that the…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…