Related papers: The evolution of pluralistic ignorance
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
Social learning, a fundamental process through which individuals shape their beliefs and perspectives via observation and interaction with others, is critical for the development of our society and the functioning of social governance.…
Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…
This paper proposes a belief-based framework for social norms in environments where individuals choose a single action. Relaxing the assumption that the appropriateness standard is common knowledge, the framework allows individuals to be…
Social biases and belief-driven behaviors can significantly impact Large Language Models (LLMs) decisions on several tasks. As LLMs are increasingly used in multi-agent systems for societal simulations, their ability to model fundamental…
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
In the present article we use the quantum formalism to describe the process of choice under rational ignorance. We consider as a basic task a question or an issue where the only answers are 0 and 1. We show that under rational ignorance the…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
Everyone wants clean air, peace and other public goods but is tempted to freeride on others' efforts. The usual way out of this dilemma is to impose norms, maintain reputations and incentivize individuals to contribute. In situations of…
The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve…
A long-standing debate is whether social influence improves the collective wisdom of a crowd or undermines it. This paper addresses this question based on a naive learning setting in influence systems theory: in our models individuals…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown…
Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies. Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote opinion…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
Human social hierarchy has the unique characteristic of existing in two forms. Firstly, as an informal hierarchy where leaders and followers are implicitly defined by their personal characteristics, and secondly, as an institutional…
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…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
Modelling efforts in opinion dynamics have to a large extent ignored that opinion exchange between individuals can also have an effect on how willing they are to express their opinion publicly. Here, we introduce a model of public opinion…
We develop a model of opinion dynamics where agents in a social network seek to learn a ground truth among a set of competing hypotheses. Agents in the network form private beliefs about such hypotheses by aggregating their neighbors'…