Related papers: Engineering polarization: How contradictory stimul…
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…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
We introduce stochastic driving in the Sznajd model of opinion spreading. This stochastic effect is meant to mimic a social temperature, so that agents can take random decisions with a varying probability. We show that a stochastic driving…
Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as…
This work extends a model of simulating influence in a network of stochastic edge dynamics to account for polarization. The model built upon is termed Dynamic Communicators and seeks to understand the process which produces low volume, high…
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…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
Collective leadership and herding may arise in standard models of opinion dynamics as an interplay of a strong separation of time scales within the population and its hierarchical organization. Using the voter model as a simple opinion…
Social networks have provided a platform for the effective exchange of ideas or opinions but also served as a hotbed of polarization. While much research attempts to explore different causes of opinion polarization, the effect of perception…
A polarized social network is modeled as a system of interacting marked point processes with memory of variable length. Each point process indicates the successive times in which a social actor expresses a "favorable" or "contrary" opinion.…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…
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…
We present a stochastic imitation-based model of opinion dynamics in which agents balance social conformity with responsiveness to an external signal. The model captures how populations evolve between two binary opinion states, driven by…
Polarization of societies is getting more and more attention from researchers working at the intersection of many fields, because it seems to be a defining feature of many public domains. In this paper, we are going to investigate how the…
Public opinion on environmental issues remains polarized in many countries, posing a significant barrier to the implementation of effective policies. Behind this polarization, empirical studies have identified social susceptibility,…
Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…
We propose and investigate different kinetic models for opinion formation, when the opinion formation process depends on an additional independent variable, e.g. a leadership or a spatial variable. More specifically, we consider:(i) opinion…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…