Related papers: Why more contact may increase cultural polarizatio…

Social fragmentation caused by widening differences among constituents has recently become a highly relevant issue to our modern society. Theoretical models of social fragmentation using the adaptive network framework have been proposed and…

How regional heterogeneity in social and cultural processes drive--and respond to--climate dynamics is little studied. Here we present a coupled social-climate model stratified across five world regions and parameterized with geophysical,…

We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…

The idea of a hierarchical spatial organization of society lies at the core of seminal theories in human geography that have strongly influenced our understanding of social organization. In the same line, the recent availability of…

Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time…

Homophily and heterophobia, the tendency for people with similar characteristics to preferentially interact with (or avoid) each other are pervasive in human social networks. Here, we develop an extension of the mathematical theory of urban…

The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map…

Urban income segregation is a widespread phenomenon that challenges societies across the globe. Classical studies on segregation have largely focused on the geographic distribution of residential neighborhoods rather than on patterns of…

How self-organization leads to the emergence of structure in social populations remains a fascinating and open question in the study of complex systems. One frequently observed structure that emerges again and again across systems is that…

We investigate the diffusion of linguistic innovations on a fully connected network in order to understand the emergence of linguistic diversity. We employ an agent-based dynamics based on the Axelrod model, where interactions between…

We interpret attitudes towards science and pseudosciences as cultural traits that diffuse in society through communication efforts exerted by agents. We present a tractable model that allows us to study the interaction among the diffusion…

Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…

We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…

Like other social animals and biological systems, human groups constantly exchange information. Network models provide a way of quantifying this process by representing the pathways of information propagation between individuals. Existing…

Contact networks are heterogeneous. People with similar characteristics are more likely to interact, a phenomenon called assortative mixing or homophily. While age-assortativity is well-established and social contact matrices for…

Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…

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…

Polarization of opinions has been empirically noted in many online social network platforms. Traditional models of opinion dynamics, based on statistical physics principles, do not account for the emergence of polarization and echo chambers…

Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…

Models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence show a sharp transition between a consensus and a polarization phase at a critical global bound of confidence. In this paper, heterogeneous bounds of confidence are studied. The…