Related papers: Disagreement Spillovers
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
In the United States, firearm-related deaths and injuries are a major public health issue. Because of limited federal action, state policies are particularly important, and their evaluation informs the actions of other policymakers. The…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
Labor unions influence economic outcomes not only through bargaining with employers over work contracts but also via political activities that can profoundly shape political systems. In unionized workplaces, they may mobilize and change the…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
Large language models can now generate political messages as persuasive as those written by humans, raising concerns about how far this persuasiveness may continue to increase with model size. Here, we generate 720 persuasive messages on 10…
An individual's opinion concerning political bias in the media is shaped by exogenous factors (independent analysis of media outputs) and endogenous factors (social activity, e.g. peer pressure by political allies and opponents in a…
Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
When a population is engaged in successive prisoner's dilemmas, indirect reciprocity through reputation fosters cooperation through the emergence of moral and action rules. A simplified model has recently been proposed where individuals…
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in civic, educational, and political information environments, concerns about their potential political bias have grown. Prior research often evaluates such bias through simulated…
We study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
Recent research in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown success in learning social behavior and cooperation. Social dilemmas between agents in mixed-sum settings have been studied extensively, but there is little research…
Language models (LMs) are known to represent the perspectives of some social groups better than others, which may impact their performance, especially on subjective tasks such as content moderation and hate speech detection. To explore how…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…