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Our belief systems are shaped by social processes, such as observations and influence, and by cognitive processes, such as the drive for internal coherence. These processes steer how individual beliefs evolve and become connected. The…
Agents with different ideologies often form alliances to achieve their goals. Paradoxically, ideologically similar agents are often opponents. In this paper, ideologically heterogeneous agents choose the ideological composition of their…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
Are we as a society getting more polarized, and if so, why? We try to answer this question through a model of opinion formation. Empirical studies have shown that homophily results in polarization. However, we show that DeGroot's well-known…
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the…
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…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
A general model of opinion dynamics is introduced in which each individual's opinion is measured on a bounded continuous spectrum. Each opinion is influenced heterogeneously by every other opinion in the population. It is demonstrated that…
We study an opinion dynamics model that explores the competition between persuasion and compromise in a population of agents with nearest-neighbor interactions on a two-dimensional square lattice. Each agent can hold either a positive or a…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Social networks have provided a platform for the effective exchange of ideas or opinions but also served as a hotbed of polarization. While much research attempts to explore different causes of opinion polarization, the effect of perception…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Recommendation algorithms, used in online social networks, shape interactions between users. In particular, link-recommendation algorithms suggest new connections and affect how individuals interact and exchange information. These…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…