Related papers: Deliberation Among Informed Citizens: The Value of…
Motivated by the literature on opinion dynamics and evolutionary game theory, we propose a novel mathematical framework to model the intertwined coevolution of opinions and decision-making in a complex social system. In the proposed…
This paper is concerned with the probability of consensus in a multivariate, spatially explicit version of the Hegselmann-Krause model for the dynamics of opinions. Individuals are located on the vertices of a finite connected graph…
Among the different disciplines in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, a fundamental class of problems is related to the prediction of the final state of the presence of individual opinions in a large population. The main aspects…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
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…
Even though it is unrealistic to expect citizens to pinpoint the policy implementation that they prefer from the set of alternatives, it is still possible to infer such information through an exercise of ranking the importance of policy…
There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
Philosophical accounts of persuasion often assume that shared evidence and rational argumentation should lead to a convergence of views between peers, yet everyday discourse often suggests otherwise. In this study, we use large language…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, many online platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatory democratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning, previous…
Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this…
Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. The decision-making protocol stands out as it can highly impact final model answers, depending on how decisions are reached. Systematic…
How do movements and coalitions which engage with multiple social issues succeed in cross-issue solidarity, and when do they instead become fragmented? To address this, the mechanisms of cross-issue interaction have to be understood. Prior…
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…
The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs…
Among the various forms of reasoning studied in the context of artificial intelligence, qualitative reasoning makes it possible to infer new knowledge in the context of imprecise, incomplete information without numerical values. In this…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…