Related papers: Using mathematics to study how people influence ea…

Mathematical models of complex social systems can enrich social scientific theory, inform interventions, and shape policy. From voting behavior to economic inequality and urban development, such models influence decisions that affect…

Individuals modify their opinions towards a topic based on their social interactions. Opinion evolution models conceptualize the change of opinion as a uni-dimensional continuum, and the effect of influence is built by the group size, the…

Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…

In this paper we propose and investigate a multi-dimensional opinion dynamics model where people are characterised by both opinions and importance weights across these opinions. Opinion changes occur through binary interactions, with a…

We here discuss the process of opinion formation in an open community where agents are made to interact and consequently update their beliefs. New actors (birth) are assumed to replace individuals that abandon the community (deaths). This…

The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…

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…

Politics today is largely about the art of messaging to influence the public, but the mathematical theory of messaging -- information and communication theory -- can turn this art into a precise analysis, both qualitative and quantitative,…

This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of…

There are many on-line settings in which users publicly express opinions. A number of these offer mechanisms for other users to evaluate these opinions; a canonical example is Amazon.com, where reviews come with annotations like "26 of 32…

We build simple computational models of belief dynamics within the framework of discrete-spin statistical physics models, and explore how suitable they are for understanding and predicting real-world belief change on both the individual and…

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…

In human societies opinion formation is mediated by social interactions, consequently taking place on a network of relationships and at the same time influencing the structure of the network and its evolution. To investigate this…

Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years,…

Interest is growing in social learning models where users share opinions and adjust their beliefs in response to others. This paper introduces generalized-bias opinion models, an extension of the DeGroot model, that captures a broader range…

In this paper we consider the modeling of opinion dynamics over time dependent large scale networks. A kinetic description of the agents' distribution over the evolving network is considered which combines an opinion update based on binary…

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views…

Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…

While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference)…

In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…