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Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…
Can proximity make friendships more diverse? To address this question, we propose a learning-driven friendship formation model to study how proximity and similarity influence the likelihood of forming social connections. The model predicts…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
In recent years, the ease with which social media can be accessed has led to the unexpected problem of a shrinkage in information sources. This phenomenon is caused by a system that facilitates the connection of people with similar ideas…
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…
We describe a model for polarization in multi-agent systems based on Esteban and Ray's standard measure of polarization from economics. Agents evolve by updating their beliefs (opinions) based on an underlying influence graph, as in the…
An asymmetric variant of the contact process where the activity spreads with different and independent random rates to the left and to the right is introduced. A real space renormalization scheme is formulated for model by means of which it…
The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 has highlighted the complex interplay between vaccine hesitancy and societal polarization. In this study, we analyse the dynamical polarization within a social network as well as the network…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Resilience and vulnerability of societies to large-scale events such as wars, climate catastrophes, immigration waves, and institutional collapses is not well-understood. Some societies prove more resilient, while others collapse. Diversity…
Argumentative dialogues across political divides can reduce polarization, yet opportunities for citizens to engage with opposing views in accessible and structured ways remain limited. AI dialogue partners offer a scalable framework for…
Simmering debates leading to polarization are observed in many domains. Although empirical findings show a strong correlation between this phenomenon and modularity of a social network, still little is known about the actual mechanisms…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Human sociality depends upon the benefits of mutual aid and extensive communication. However mutual aid is made difficult by the problems of coordinating diverse norms and preferences, and communication is harried by substantial ambiguity…
We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…
Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…
We introduce a general modeling framework to predict the outcomes, at the population level, of individual psychology and behavior. The framework prescribes that researchers build a cost function that embodies knowledge of what trait values…
We study the influence of hesitating agents in the Axelrod model by introducing an intrinsic noise, which is proportional to the disagreement between the interacting agents, and thus coupled to the dynamics. Our results show that, unlike…