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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…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
Populations of competing biological species exhibit a fascinating interplay between the nonlinear dynamics of evolutionary selection forces and random fluctuations arising from the stochastic nature of the interactions. The processes…
We investigate a model where strong noise in a sub-population creates a metastable state in an otherwise unstable two-population system. The induced metastable state is vortex-like, and its persistence time grows exponentially with the…
Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent…
Model collapse, a phenomenon characterized by performance degradation due to iterative training on synthetic data, has been widely studied. However, its implications for bias amplification, the progressive intensification of pre-existing…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…
Artificial intelligence functions not as an epistemic leveller, but as an accelerant of cognitive stratification, entrenching and formalising informational castes within liberal-democratic societies. Synthesising formal epistemology,…
The Hegselmann--Krause model is a prototypical model for opinion dynamics. It models the stochastic time evolution of an agent's or voter's opinion in response to the opinion of other like-minded agents. The Hegselmann--Krause model only…
Coupling dynamics of the states of the nodes of a network to the dynamics of the network topology leads to generic absorbing and fragmentation transitions. The coevolving voter model is a typical system that exhibits such transitions at…
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…
We extend simple opinion models to obtain stable but continuously evolving communities. Our scope is to meet a challenge raised by sociologists of generating "structures that last from non lasting entities". We achieve this by introducing…
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…
This paper extends previous work on echo chambers modeled by an Ising-like system at zero temperature (1. Echo Chambers and random Polarization, Symmetry 2024, 16(12), 1566). There, polarization emerged as a spontaneous symmetry-breaking…
We study opinion dynamics on networks with a nontrivial community structure, assuming individuals can update their binary opinion as the result of the interactions with an external influence with strength $h\in [0,1]$ and with other…
A stochastic system under the influence of a stochastic environment is correlated with both present and future states of the environment. Such a system can be seen as implicitly implementing a predictive model of future environmental…
A stochastic mode reduction strategy is applied to multiscale models with a deterministic energy-conserving fast sub-system. Specifically, we consider situations where the slow variables are driven stochastically and interact with the fast…