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A society of agents, with ideological positions, or "opinions" measured by real values ranging from $-\infty$ (the "far left") to $+\infty$ (the "far right"), is considered. At fixed (unit) time intervals agents repeatedly reconsider and…
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups,…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Statisticians are not only one of the earliest professional adopters of data visualization, but also some of its most prolific users. Understanding how these professionals utilize visual representations in their analytic process may shed…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
Amidst the rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent systems have come to dominate political discourse across information media. However, internalized political biases stemming from training data skews,…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…
There is growing concern that over the past decade, industrialized democratic nations are becoming increasingly politically polarized. Indeed, elections in the US, UK, France, and Germany have all seen tightly won races, with notable…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
Analyzing ideology and polarization is of critical importance in advancing our grasp of modern politics. Recent research has made great strides towards understanding the ideological bias (i.e., stance) of news media along the left-right…
When we view visualizations, we not only have a visual representation of the data, but also a verbal one. Recent work has shown that these visual representations of data can be biased, such that the position of a line in a chart will be…
Models of opinion dynamics play a major role in various disciplines, including economics, political science, psychology, and social science, as they provide a framework for analysis and intervention. In spite of the numerous mathematical…
We present a simple regularization of adversarial perturbations based upon the perceptual loss. While the resulting perturbations remain imperceptible to the human eye, they differ from existing adversarial perturbations in that they are…
Non-linear voter models assume that the opinion of an agent depends on the opinions of its neighbors in a non-linear manner. This allows for voting rules different from majority voting. While the linear voter model is known to reach…
The increasing polarization in democratic societies is an emergent outcome of political opinion dynamics. Yet, the fundamental mechanisms behind the formation of political opinions, from individual beliefs to collective consensus, remain…
With the rising participation of the common mass in social media, it is increasingly common now for policymakers/journalists to create online polls on social media to understand the political leanings of people in specific locations. The…
Polarization has increased substantially in political discourse, contributing to a widening partisan divide. In this paper, we analyzed large-scale, real-world language use in Reddit communities (294,476,146 comments) and in news outlets…
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…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
People commonly utilize visualizations not only to examine a given dataset, but also to draw generalizable conclusions about the underlying models or phenomena. Prior research has compared human visual inference to that of an optimal…