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Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…
Centrality is one of the most studied concepts in social network analysis. There is a huge literature regarding centrality measures, as ways to identify the most relevant users in a social network. The challenge is to find measures that can…
Work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with other individuals. This manifests principally in cooperative communication, that is, intentional communication geared towards aligning…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Precisely how humans process relational patterns of information in knowledge, language, music, and society is not well understood. Prior work in the field of statistical learning has demonstrated that humans process such information by…
We present a toy model of opinion spreading in a society which combines a self-reinforcing mechanism with diffusion. The relative strength of these two mechanisms - called the affectability of the system - is a free parameter of the model.…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
I hypothesize that re-occurring prior experience of complex systems mobilizes a fast response, whose attractor is encoded by their strongly connected network core. In contrast, responses to novel stimuli are often slow and require the…
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…
Understanding the heterogeneous role of individuals in large-scale information spreading is essential to manage online behavior as well as its potential offline consequences. To this end, most existing studies from diverse research domains…
Indirect reciprocity is a key explanation for the exceptional magnitude of cooperation among humans. This literature suggests that a large proportion of human cooperation is driven by social norms and individuals' incentives to maintain a…
In (Deffuant et al., 2002), we proposed a simple model of opinion dynamics, which we used to simulate the influence of extremists in a population. Simulations were run without any specific interaction structure and varying the simulation…
Targeting influential nodes in complex networks allows fastening or hindering rumors, epidemics, and electric blackouts. Since communities are prevalent in real-world networks, community-aware centrality measures exploit this information to…
Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method…
Social studies researchers use graphs to model group activities in social networks. An important property in this context is the centrality of a vertex: the inverse of the average distance to each other vertex. We describe a randomized…
We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…
Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated…
Neuroscience has uncovered a fundamental mechanism of our social nature: human brain activity becomes synchronized with others in many social contexts involving interaction. Traditionally, social minds have been regarded as an exclusive…
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…
In the face of the stupefying complexity of the human brain, network analysis is a most useful tool that allows one to greatly simplify the problem, typically by approximating the billions of neurons comprising the brain by means of a…