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We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
A simple Ising spin model which can describe a mechanism of making a decision in a closed community is proposed. It is shown via standard Monte Carlo simulations that very simple rules lead to rather complicated dynamics and to a power law…
We build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
A two state model for opinion forming, which has proven heuristic power, is reviewed with a novel emphasis on the existence or absence of a threshold for the dynamics. Monitored by repeated small groups discussions floater agents update…
The Ising model, originally developed for understanding magnetic phase transitions, has become a cornerstone in the study of collective phenomena across diverse disciplines. In this review, we explore how Ising and Ising-like models have…
In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity and…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…
We revisit the no tie breaking 2-state Galam contrarian model of opinion dynamics for update groups of size 3. While the initial model assumes a constant density of contrarians a for both opinions, it now depends for each opinion on its…