Related papers: Bayesian Polarization
This paper aims to provide a systemic analysis to social opinion dynamics subject to individual biases. As a generalization of the classical DeGroot social interactions, defined by linearly coupled dynamics of peer opinions that evolve over…
In experimental applications of bounded-reasoning models, behavior is often summarized by distributions of "levels". We argue that such summaries conflate two conceptually distinct dimensions: a player's type, capturing beliefs about what…
In this paper, we introduce the Iterative Persuasion-Polarization (IPP) model to study the dynamics of opinion formation and change within a population. The IPP model integrates mechanisms of persuasion and repulsion, where individuals…
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…
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 formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives". Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we model a narrative as a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection…
Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…
Our belief systems are shaped by social processes, such as observations and influence, and by cognitive processes, such as the drive for internal coherence. These processes steer how individual beliefs evolve and become connected. The…
We describe a model for polarization in multi-agent systems based on Esteban and Ray's standard family of polarization measures from economics. Agents evolve by updating their beliefs (opinions) based on an underlying influence graph, as in…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
We provide an agent-based model to explain the emergence of collective opinions not based on feedback between different opinions, but based on emotional interactions between agents. The driving variable is the emotional state of agents,…
Opinion dynamics, the evolution of individuals through social interactions, is an important area of research with applications ranging from politics to marketing. Due to its interdisciplinary relevance, studies of opinion dynamics remain…
In public opinion studies, the relationships between opinions on different topics are likely to shift based on the characteristics of the respondents. Thus, understanding the complexities of public opinion requires methods that can account…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
We investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…
The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Search engines play a crucial role in shaping public discourse by influencing how information is accessed and framed. While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias -- such as content prioritization,…
People naturally bring their prior beliefs to bear on how they interpret the new information, yet few formal models exist for accounting for the influence of users' prior beliefs in interactions with data presentations like visualizations.…