Related papers: Belief sharing: a blessing or a curse
Susceptibility to misinformation describes the degree of belief in unverifiable claims, a latent aspect of individuals' mental processes that is not observable. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on self-reported beliefs, which…
We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…
We study rationally inattentive echo chambers, where players allocate limited attention to biased primary sources and to other players as secondary sources to acquire information about an uncertain state. The resulting Poisson attention…
Collaboration is a key driver of science and innovation. Mainly motivated by the need to leverage different capacities and expertise to solve a scientific problem, collaboration is also an excellent source of information about the future…
Here we consider the communications tactics appropriate for a group of agents that need to "swarm" together in a highly adversarial environment. Specfically, whilst they need to cooperate by exchanging information with each other about…
Conversation is like an intricate partner dance and behavioral convergence, or the similarity in observable behaviors of partners over time, can lead to shared understanding, changed beliefs and increased rapport. This article describes a…
The emergence of online social networks has greatly facilitated the diffusion of information and behaviors. While the two diffusion processes are often intertwined, "talking the talk" does not necessarily mean "walking the talk"--those who…
We consider the two-fold problem of representing collective beliefs and aggregating these beliefs. We propose modular, transitive relations for collective beliefs. They allow us to represent conflicting opinions and they have a clear…
Social media users drive the spread of misinformation online by sharing posts that include erroneous information or commenting on controversial topics with unsubstantiated arguments often in earnest. Work on echo chambers has suggested that…
We develop a model of wishful thinking that incorporates the costs and benefits of biased beliefs. We establish the connection between distorted beliefs and risk, revealing how wishful thinking can be understood in terms of risk measures.…
In expert-consultation dialogues, it is inevitable that an agent will at times have insufficient information to determine whether to accept or reject a proposal by the other agent. This results in the need for the agent to initiate an…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Collaborative decision making in multi-agent systems typically requires a predefined communication protocol among agents. Usually, agent-level observations are locally processed and information is exchanged using the predefined protocol,…
This work addresses private communication with distributed systems in mind. We consider how to best use secret key resources and communication to transmit signals across a system so that an eavesdropper is least capable to act on the…
Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity…
Random beacons-information sources that broadcast a stream of random digits unknown by anyone beforehand-are useful for various cryptographic purposes. But such beacons can be easily and undetectably sabotaged, so that their output is known…
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…
When humans cooperate, they frequently coordinate their activity through both verbal communication and non-verbal actions, using this information to infer a shared goal and plan. How can we model this inferential ability? In this paper, we…
The advent and proliferation of social media have led to the development of mathematical models describing the evolution of beliefs/opinions in an ecosystem composed of socially interacting users. The goal is to gain insights into…
Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction,…