Related papers: On the Graph Theory of Majority Illusions: Theoret…
Majority illusion occurs in a social network when the majority of the network nodes belong to a certain type but each node's neighbours mostly belong to a different type, therefore creating the wrong perception, i.e., the illusion, that the…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
Majority Illusion is a phenomenon in social networks wherein the decision by the majority of the network is not the same as one's personal social circle's majority, leading to an incorrect perception of the majority in a large network. In…
Cognitive biases are often attributed to heuristics or limited information. Yet the structure of social networks is a key, often-overlooked source of perceptual bias. When information passes through social connections, the network alone can…
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…
An opinion illusion refers to a phenomenon in social networks where agents may witness distributions of opinions among their neighbours that do not accurately reflect the true distribution of opinions in the population as a whole. A…
Whether, and under what conditions, groups exhibit "crowd wisdom" has been a major focus of research across the social and computational sciences. Much of this work has focused on the role of social influence in promoting the wisdom of the…
The complexity of human behaviour can lead to very unpredictable patterns in social activity and structure. Here we demonstrate the instability of a community network controlled by majority ruling, where an element adopts the most popular…
In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law 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…
A major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions.…
Social media has transformed global communication, yet its network structure can systematically distort perceptions through effects like the majority illusion and echo chambers. We introduce the perception gap index, a graph-based measure…
Wisdom of crowds refers to the phenomenon that the aggregate prediction or forecast of a group of individuals can be surprisingly more accurate than most individuals in the group, and sometimes - than any of the individuals comprising it.…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
The friendship paradox in social networks states that your friends have more friends than you do, on average. Recently, a stronger variant of the paradox was shown to hold for most people within a network: `most of your friends have more…
With the advent of online networks, societies are substantially more connected with individual members able to easily modify and maintain their own social links. Here, we show that active network maintenance exposes agents to confirmation…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
We study the evolution of opinions on a directed network with community structure. Individuals update their opinions synchronously based on a weighted average of their neighbors' opinions, their own previous opinions, and external media…
Consider n individuals who, by popular vote, choose among q >= 2 alternatives, one of which is "better" than the others. Assume that each individual votes independently at random, and that the probability of voting for the better…