Related papers: Group interactions modulate critical mass dynamics…

For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…

We use a model of opinion formation to study the consequences of some mechanisms attempting to enforce the right behaviour in a society. We start from a model where the possible choices are not equivalent (such is the case when the agents…

We show that accounting for internal character among interacting, heterogeneous entities generates rich phase transition behavior between isolation and cohesive dynamical grouping. Our analytical and numerical calculations reveal different…

Social groups are fundamental elements of any social system. Their emergence and evolution are closely related to the structure and dynamics of a social system. Research on social groups was primarily focused on the growth and the structure…

Though deliberation is a critical component of democratic decision-making, existing deliberative processes do not scale to large groups of people. Motivated by this, we propose a model in which large-scale decision-making takes place…

Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…

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…

The cohesion of a social group is the group's tendency to remain united. It has important implications for the stability and survival of social organizations, such as political parties, research teams, or online groups. Empirical studies…

Large-scale transitions in societies are associated with both individual behavioural change and restructuring of the social network. These two factors have often been considered independently, yet recent advances in social network research…

A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…

In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity and…

Social hierarchy in animal groups carries a crucial adaptive function by reducing conflict and injury while protecting valuable group resources. Social hierarchy is dynamic and can be altered by social conflict, agonistic interactions, and…

Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…

Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the…

The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically…

We construct and analyze a random graph model for discrete choice with social interaction and several groups of equal size. We concentrate on the case of two groups of equal sizes and we allow the interaction strength within a group to…

A social network is often divided into many factions. People are friends within each faction, while they are enemies of the other factions, and even my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. This configuration can be described in terms…

According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…

In many domains of life, business and management, numerous problems are addressed by small groups of individuals engaged in face-to-face discussions. While research in social psychology has a long history of studying the determinants of…

Recent progress in the large scale mapping of social networks is opening new quantitative windows into the structure of human societies. These networks are largely the result of how we access and utilize information. Here I show that a…