Related papers: The evolution of pluralistic ignorance
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Social contagion is the process in which people adopt a belief, idea, or practice from a neighbor and pass it along to someone else. For over 100 years, scholars of social contagion have almost exclusively made the same implicit assumption:…
Belief perseverance is the widely documented tendency of holding to a belief, even in the presence of contradicting evidence. In online environments, this tendency leads to heated arguments with users ``blocking'' each other. Introducing…
In our modern society, people are daily confronted with an increasing amount of information of any kind. As a consequence, the attention capacities and processing abilities of individuals often saturate. People, therefore, have to select…
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…
Recent technological changes have increased connectivity between individuals around the world leading to higher frequency interactions between members of communities that would be otherwise distant and disconnected. This paper examines a…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
We study maximum entropy mechanisms of information exchange between agents modeled by neural networks and the macroscopic states of a society of such agents in a few situations. Mathematical quantification of surprise, distrust of other…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
Two different approaches to dealing with probabilistic knowledge are examined -models and inductive inference. Examples of the first are: influence diagrams [1], Bayesian networks [2], log-linear models [3, 4]. Examples of the second are:…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
This paper introduces a new model of continuous opinion dynamics with random noise. The model belongs to the broad class of so called bounded confidence models. It differs from other popular bounded confidence models by the update rule,…
We consider social learning in a changing world. Society can remain responsive to state changes only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which limits the value of social learning. When the state is close to persistent, a…
Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show that for a broad set of…
Protest is ubiquitous in the 21st Century and the people who participate in such movements do so because they seek to bring about social change. However, social change takes time and involves repeated interactions between individual…
The ability of a society to make the right decisions on relevant matters relies on its capability to properly aggregate the noisy information spread across the individuals it is made of. In this paper we study the information aggregation…