Related papers: Disagreement Spillovers
Alignment is a social phenomenon wherein individuals share a common goal or perspective. Mirroring, or mimicking the behaviors and opinions of another individual, is one mechanism by which individuals can become aligned. Large scale…
The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who…
We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a `yes' or `no' initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to social influence. We consider anonymous…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
In this study, groups who could not reach a consensus were investigated using the group polarization paradigm. The purpose was to explore the conditions leading to intragroup disagreement and attitude change following disagreement among 269…
Some political strategies to win elections over the last years were based heavily on fomenting general distrust in information institutions and favoring distrustful sources. The misinformation pandemic has the straightforward consequence…
With the prevalence of misinformation online, researchers have focused on developing various machine learning algorithms to detect fake news. However, users' perception of machine learning outcomes and related behaviors have been widely…
We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially…
We study maximum entropy mechanisms of information exchange between agents modeled by neural networks and the macroscopic states of a society of such agents in a few situations. Mathematical quantification of surprise, distrust of other…
We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large…
Due to the widespread use of large language models (LLMs), we need to understand whether they embed a specific "worldview" and what these views reflect. Recent studies report that, prompted with political questionnaires, LLMs show…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
This paper provides a formal model for the burden of persuasion in dialogues, and in particular, in legal proceedings. The model shows how an allocation of the burden of persuasion may induce single outcomes in dialectical contexts in…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping how information is created and disseminated, from companies using them to craft persuasive advertisements, to election campaigns optimizing messaging to gain votes, to social media…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…