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We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
Homophily, the tendency of humans to attract each other when sharing similar features, traits, or opinions has been identified as one of the main driving forces behind the formation of structured societies. Here we ask to what extent…
The voter model and the Axelrod model are two of the main stochastic processes that describe the spread of opinions on networks. The former includes social influence, the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact,…
Recently, social debates have been marked by increased polarization of social groups. Such polarization not only implies that groups cannot reach a consensus on fundamental questions but also materializes in more modular social…
In this paper, we discuss the passage to hydrodynamic equations for kinetic models of opinion formation. The considered kinetic models feature an opinion density depending on an additional microscopic variable, identified with the personal…
Rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have not only empowered autonomous agents to generate social networks, communicate, and form shared and diverging opinions on political issues, but have also begun to play a growing role in…
We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a `yes' or `no' initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to social influence. We consider anonymous…
How self-organization leads to the emergence of structure in social populations remains a fascinating and open question in the study of complex systems. One frequently observed structure that emerges again and again across systems is that…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
People are observed to assortatively connect on a set of traits. This phenomenon, termed assortative mixing or sometimes homophily, can be quantified through assortativity coefficient in social networks. Uncovering the exact causes of…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…
As algorithmic tools increasingly aid experts in making consequential decisions, the need to understand the precise factors that mediate their influence has grown commensurately. In this paper, we present a crowdsourcing vignette study…
Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
Understanding what and how causal dynamical mechanisms generate collective phenomena is a central challenge in complexity science. Recent studies have focused on identifying the mechanisms underlying the synergistic interdependencies that…
Opinion polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in opinion dynamics. In contrast to the traditional consensus oriented group decision making (GDM) framework, this paper proposes a framework with the co-evolution of both opinions and…