Related papers: Whataboutism
We study a model of opinion formation where the opinions in conflict are not equivalent. This is the case when the subject of the decision is to respect a norm or a law. In such scenarios, one of the possible behaviors is to abide by the…
In this paper, we propose a two-layer adoption-opinion model to study the diffusion of two competing technologies within a population whose opinions evolve under social influence and adoption-driven feedback. After adopting one technology,…
Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad),…
Statistical mechanics has proven to be able to capture the fundamental rules underlying phenomena of social aggregation and opinion dynamics, well studied in disciplines like sociology and psychology. This approach is based on the…
This paper proposes a mathematical model for the coevolution of actions and opinions for a population facing a social dilemma. In particular, we assume each person participates in a Public Goods Game (PGG), with their action being to…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
The detection of offensive language in the context of a dialogue has become an increasingly important application of natural language processing. The detection of trolls in public forums (Gal\'an-Garc\'ia et al., 2016), and the deployment…
We investigate Kantian equilibria in finite normal form games, a class of non-Nashian, morally motivated courses of action that was recently proposed in the economics literature. We highlight a number of problems with such equilibria,…
In this paper we consider non-atomic games in populations that are provided with a choice of preventive policies to act against a contagion spreading amongst interacting populations, be it biological organisms or connected computing…
There are multiple notions of coalitional responsibility. The focus of this paper is on the blameworthiness defined through the principle of alternative possibilities: a coalition is blamable for a statement if the statement is true, but…
This paper is about simulating the spread of opinions in a society and about finding ways to counteract that spread. To abstract away from potentially emotionally laden opinions, we instead simulate the spread of a zombie outbreak in a…
Reputation is generally defined as the opinion of a group on an aspect of a thing. This paper presents a reputation model that follows a probabilistic modelling of opinions based on three main concepts: (1) the value of an opinion decays…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
We used an ecological approach based on a neutral model to study the competition for attention in an online social network. This novel approach allow us to analyze some ecological patterns that has also an insightful meaning in the context…
We analyze the critical behavior of a class of discrete opinion models in the presence of disorder. Within this class, each agent opinion takes a discrete value ($\pm 1$ or 0) and its time evolution is ruled by two terms, one representing…
This paper explores how ambiguity affects communication. We consider a cheap talk model in which the receiver evaluates the sender's message with respect to its worst-case expected payoff generated by multiplier preferences. We characterize…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
Under certain circumstances such as lack of information or bounded rationality, human players can take decisions on which strategy to choose in a game on the basis of simple opinions. These opinions can be modified after each round by…