Related papers: Disagreement and fragmentation in growing groups
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
Cooperation for public goods poses a dilemma, where individuals are tempted to free ride on others' contributions. Classic solutions involve monitoring, reputation maintenance and costly incentives, but there are important collective…
Recent attempts to understand the origin of social fragmentation are based on spin models which include terms accounting for two social phenomena: homophily -- the tendency for people with similar opinions to establish positive relations --…
Misinformation -- false or misleading information -- is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and…
The spontaneous formation and subsequent growth, dissolution, merger and competition of social groups bears similarities to physical phase transitions in metastable finite systems. We examine three different scenarios, percolation, spinodal…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
Many systems of interest exhibit nested emergent layers with their own rules and regularities, and our knowledge about them seems naturally organised around these levels. This paper proposes that this type of hierarchical emergence arises…
This paper examines the interplay of opinion exchange dynamics and communication network formation. An opinion formation procedure is introduced which is based on an abstract representation of opinions as $k$--dimensional bit--strings.…
Multi-agent models often describe populations segregated either in the physical space, i.e. subdivided in metapopulations, or in the ecology of opinions, i.e. partitioned in echo chambers. Here we show how the interplay between homophily…
Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
The bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics, introduced by Deffuant et al, is a stochastic model for the evolution of continuous-valued opinions within a finite group of peers. We prove that, as time goes to infinity, the opinions…
We analyze a model designed to describe the spread and accumulation of opinions in a population. Inspired by the social contagion paradigm, our model is built on the classical SIR model of Kermack and McKendrick and consists in a system of…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
The inclusion of a fragmentation mechanism in population balance equations introduces complex interactions that make the analytical or even computational treatment much more difficult than for the pure aggregation case. This is specially…
We study a model of opinion formation where the opinions in conflict are not equivalent. This is the case when the subject of the decision is to respect a norm or a law. In such scenarios, one of the possible behaviors is to abide by the…
In the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, it is an important problem to predict which individual opinions will eventually dominate in a large population, if there will be a consensus, and how long it takes a consensus to form. This…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…