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Belief dynamics are fundamental to human behavior and social coordination. Individuals rely on accurate beliefs to make decisions, and shared beliefs form the basis of successful cooperation. Traditional studies often examined beliefs in…
As problems in political polarization and the spread of misinformation become serious, belief propagation on a social network becomes an important question to explore. Previous breakthroughs have been made in algorithmic approaches to…
People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…
We develop a model of opinion dynamics where agents in a social network seek to learn a ground truth among a set of competing hypotheses. Agents in the network form private beliefs about such hypotheses by aggregating their neighbors'…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
Understanding how humans revise their beliefs in light of new information is crucial for developing AI systems which can effectively model, and thus align with, human reasoning. While theoretical belief revision frameworks rely on a set of…
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…
Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
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…
Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we analyze a network epistemology model in which agents, all else…
Dynamic network models (DNMs) are belief networks for temporal reasoning. The DNM methodology combines techniques from time series analysis and probabilistic reasoning to provide (1) a knowledge representation that integrates…
Data based judgments go into artificial intelligence applications but they undergo paradoxical reversal when seemingly unnecessary additional data is provided. Examples of this are Simpson's reversal and the disjunction effect where the…
Evolution of belief systems has always been in focus of cognitive research. In this paper we delineate a new model describing belief systems as a network of statements considered true. Testing the model a small number of parameters enabled…
Statistical models of natural stimuli provide an important tool for researchers in the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. A canonical way to quantitatively assess and compare the performance of statistical models is…
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…
Social networks continuously change as new ties are created and existing ones fade. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts a strong influence on what information we receive and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However,…
We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and…