Related papers: Why more contact may increase cultural polarizatio…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
Individuals are always limited by some inelastic resources, such as time and energy, which restrict them to dedicate to social interaction and limit their contact capacity. Contact capacity plays an important role in dynamics of social…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
We analyze the dynamics toward cultural consensus in the Axelrod model on scale-free networks. By looking at the microscopic dynamics of the model, we are able to show how culture traits spread across different cultural features. We compare…
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…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important…
We study the one-dimensional version of Axelrod's model of cultural transmission from the point of view of optimization dynamics. We show the existence of a Lyapunov potential for the dynamics. The global minimum of the potential, or…
We study the Axelrod's cultural adaptation model using the concept of cluster size entropy, $S_{c}$ that gives information on the variability of the cultural cluster size present in the system. Using networks of different topologies, from…
Echo chamber effects in social networks are generally attributed to the prevalence of interactions among like-minded peers. However, recent evidence has emphasized the role of hostile interactions between opposite-minded groups. We…
Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
We employ an agent-based model for cultural dynamics to investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the collective behavior of a social system. We introduce heterogeneity as a random distribution of defects or imperfections in a…
Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders in a world that is becoming more and more globalised. This news and opinion is often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily such as political…
Social networks are not static but rather constantly evolve in time. One of the elements thought to drive the evolution of social network structure is homophily - the need for individuals to connect with others who are similar to them. In…
Xenophobic interactions play a role as important as homophilic ones in shaping many dynamical processes on social networks, such as opinion formation, social balance, or epidemic spreading. In this paper, we use belief propagation and Monte…
The Axelrod model for the dissemination of culture exhibits a rich spatial distribution of cultural domains, which depends on the values of the two model parameters: $F$, the number of cultural features and $q$, the common number of states…
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…