Related papers: Social polarization promoted by sparse higher-orde…

In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…

As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…

Collective decision-making is a widespread phenomenon in both biological and artificial systems, where individuals reach a consensus through social interactions. While traditional models of opinion dynamics and contagion focus on pairwise…

Representing social systems as networks, starting from the interactions between individuals, sheds light on the mechanisms governing their dynamics. However, networks encode only pairwise interactions, while most social interactions occur…

The interplay between causal mechanisms and emerging collective behaviors is a central aspect of understanding, controlling, and predicting complex networked systems. In our work, we investigate the relationship between higher-order…

It is known that individuals in social networks tend to exhibit homophily (a.k.a. assortative mixing) in their social ties, which implies that they prefer bonding with others of their own kind. But what are the reasons for this phenomenon?…

Homophily -- the tendency of individuals to interact with similar others -- shapes how networks form and function. Yet existing approaches typically collapse homophily to a single scale, either one parameter for the whole network or one per…

Schelling segregation is a well-established model used to investigate the dynamics of segregation in agent-based models. Since we consider segregation to be key for the development of political polarisation, we are interested in what…

Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…

Simmering debates leading to polarization are observed in many domains. Although empirical findings show a strong correlation between this phenomenon and modularity of a social network, still little is known about the actual mechanisms…

Understanding what and how causal dynamical mechanisms generate collective phenomena is a central challenge in complexity science. Recent studies have focused on identifying the mechanisms underlying the synergistic interdependencies that…

While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important…

The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…

When exposed to a contagion phenomenon, individuals may respond to the perceived risk of infection by adopting behavioral changes, aiming to reduce their exposure or their risk of infecting others. The social cost of such adaptive behaviors…

Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…

We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…

We consider a dynamic network of individuals that may hold one of two different opinions in a two-party society. As a dynamical model, agents can endlessly create and delete links to satisfy a preferred degree, and the network is shaped by…

Non-reciprocal interactions play a crucial role in many social and biological complex systems. While directionality has been thoroughly accounted for in networks with pairwise interactions, its effects in systems with higher-order…

We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…

This paper studies how a centralized planner can modify the structure of a social or information network to reduce polarization. First, polarization is found to be highly dependent on degree and structural properties of the network --…