Related papers: Group interactions modulate critical mass dynamics…
Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
From the formation of ice in small clusters of water molecules to the mass raids of army ant colonies, the emergent behavior of collectives depends critically on their size. At the same time, common wisdom holds that such behaviors are…
Natural collectives, despite comprising individuals who may not know their numerosity, can exhibit behaviors that depend sensitively on it. This paper proves that the collective behavior of number-oblivious individuals can even have a…
We use a Cooperative Decision Making (CDM) model to study the effect of committed minorities on group behavior in time of crisis. The CDM model has been shown to generate consensus through a phase-transition process that at criticality…
The critical mass effect is a prevailing topic in the study of complex systems. Recent research has shown that a minority of zealots can effectively drive widespread cooperation in social dilemma games. However, achieving a critical mass of…
Tiny perturbations may trigger large responses in systems near criticality, shifting them across equilibria. Committed minorities are suggested to be responsible for the emergence of collective behaviors in many physical, social, and…
Messages conveyed by media act as a major drive in shaping attitudes and inducing opinion shift. On the other hand, individuals are strongly affected by peer pressure while forming their own judgment. We solve a general model of opinion…
The success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or…
Uncovering how inequality emerges from human interaction is imperative for just societies. Here we show that the way social groups interact in face-to-face situations can enable the emergence of disparities in the visibility of social…
Collective violence in direct confrontations between two opposing groups happens in short bursts wherein small subgroups briefly attack small numbers of opponents, while the others form a non-fighting audience. The mechanism is fighters'…
We study a model of opinion formation where the collective decision of group is said to happen if the fraction of agents having the most common opinion exceeds a threshold value, a \textit{critical mass}. We find that there exists a unique,…
Fights-to-the-death occur in many natural, medical and commercial settings. Standard mass action theory and conventional wisdom imply that the minority (i.e. smaller) group's survival time decreases as its relative initial size decreases,…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
Emergent collective group processes and capabilities have been studied through analysis of transactive memory, measures of group task performance, and group intelligence, among others. In their approach to collective behaviors, these…
In this paper we propose a dynamical interpretation of the sociological distinction between large and small groups of interacting individuals. In the former case individual behaviors are largely dominated by the group effect, while in the…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Social interaction increases significantly the performance of a wide range of cooperative systems. However, evidence that natural swarms limit the number of social connections suggests potentially detrimental consequences of excessive…
We study noisy majority-rule dynamics on annealed hypergraphs to clarify how variability in group interaction sizes reshapes collective ordering. At each update, a group is sampled from a prescribed size distribution and either follows the…
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…
The extent to which committed minorities can overturn social conventions is an active area of research in the mathematical modelling of opinion dynamics. Researchers generally use simulations of agent-based models (ABMs) to compute…