Related papers: Decoding Susceptibility: Modeling Misbelief to Mis…
Social susceptibility is defined and analyzed using data from CNN news website. The current models of opinion dynamics, voting, and herding in closed communities are extended, and the community's response to the injection of a group with…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
Nearly all statistical analyses that inform policy-making are based on imperfect data. As examples, the data may suffer from measurement errors, missing values, sample selection bias, or record linkage errors. Analysts have to decide how to…
One strength of modern language models is their ability to incorporate information from a user-input context when answering queries. However, they are not equally sensitive to the subtle changes to that context. To quantify this, Du et al.…
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an infodemic where an overwhelming amount of COVID-19 related content was being disseminated at high velocity through social media. This made it challenging for citizens to differentiate between accurate and…
News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these social engagement signals increases the vulnerability of users to…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an…
Social media platforms often assume that users can self-correct against misinformation. However, social media users are not equally susceptible to all misinformation as their biases influence what types of misinformation might thrive and…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
In a world where ideas flow freely between people across multiple platforms, we often find ourselves relying on others' information without an objective standard to judge whether those opinions are accurate. The present study tests an…
As large language models (LLMs) integrate into collaborative teams, their social conformity -- the tendency to align with majority opinions -- has emerged as a key concern. In humans, conformity arises from informational influence (rational…
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…
A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we…
The ability for individuals to constructively engage with one another across lines of difference is a critical feature of a healthy pluralistic society. This is also true in online discussion spaces like social media platforms. To date,…
We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…
The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics…
Beliefs are not facts, but they are factive - they feel like facts. This property is what can make misinformation dangerous. Being able to deliberately navigate through a landscape of often conflicting factive statements is difficult when…
The spread of online misinformation threatens public health, democracy, and the broader society. While professional fact-checkers form the first line of defense by fact-checking popular false claims, they do not engage directly in…
The impact of multimodal misinformation arises not only from factual inaccuracies but also from the misleading narratives that creators deliberately embed. Interpreting such creator intent is therefore essential for multimodal…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…