Related papers: NGO Activism: Exposure vs. Influence
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
We present a study that examines how a social media activism campaign aimed at improving gender diversity within engineering gained and maintained momentum in its early period. We examined over 50,000 Tweets posted over the first ~75 days…
One aspect of intelligence is the ability to restructure your own environment so that the world you live in becomes more beneficial to you. In this paper we investigate how the information-theoretic measure of agent empowerment can provide…
Collaboration plays a key role in knowledge production. Here, we show that patterns of interaction during conferences can be used to predict who will subsequently form a new collaboration, even when interaction is prescribed rather than…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including…
Social norms are rules and standards of expected behavior that emerge in societies as a result of information exchange between agents. This paper studies the effects of emergent social norms on the performance of teams. We use the…
Anthropologists have observed gift relationships that establish social relations as well as the transference of goods in many human societies. The totality of such social relations constitutes the network. Social scientists have analysed…
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…
Previous work has shown that popular trending events are important external factors which pose significant influence on user search behavior and also provided a way to computationally model this influence. However, their problem formulation…
Networked environments shape how information embedded in narratives influences individual and group beliefs and behavior. This raises key questions about how group communication around narrative media impacts belief formation and how such…
Unconstructive debate and uncivil communication carry well-documented costs for productivity and cohesion, yet isolating their effect on operational efficiency has proven difficult. Human subject research in this domain is constrained by…
This research investigates the impact of dynamic, time-varying interactions on cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. Traditional research has focused on deterministic rules governing pairwise interactions, yet the impact of interaction…
DeGroot-style opinion formation presumes a continuous interaction among agents of a social network. Hence, it cannot handle agents external to the social network that interact only temporarily with the permanent ones. Many real-world…
Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve from single-user assistants to active participants in civic and workplace deliberation, evaluating their effects on collective decision making becomes a governance challenge. We present two empirical…
We study the dynamics of public opinion in a model in which agents change their opinions as a result of random binary encounters if the opinion difference is below their individual thresholds that evolve over time. We ground these…
Given that data-dependent algorithmic systems have become impactful in more domains of life, the need for individuals to promote their own interests and hold algorithms accountable has grown. To have meaningful influence, individuals must…
In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…
Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…