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In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
Some political strategies to win elections over the last years were based heavily on fomenting general distrust in information institutions and favoring distrustful sources. The misinformation pandemic has the straightforward consequence…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
The only acceptable form of polling in the multi-billion dollar survey research field utilizes representative samples. We argue that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polling can provide accurate predictions, and often…
How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first…
Arrow's Theorem concerns a fundamental problem in social choice theory: given the individual preferences of members of a group, how can they be aggregated to form rational group preferences? Arrow showed that in an election between three or…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to its plurality-vote counterpart and analyze the time scale to consensus when voters are given more than two options. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population…
We investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can track public opinion as measured by exit polls during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Our analysis focuses on headline favorability (e.g., "Favorable" vs. "Unfavorable") of…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
We analyze the structure of the disagreement among a population of voters over a set of alternatives. Surveys typically ask either for pairwise comparisons, simple and intuitive for participants, or full rankings over alternatives,…
This paper introduces a new model of continuous opinion dynamics with random noise. The model belongs to the broad class of so called bounded confidence models. It differs from other popular bounded confidence models by the update rule,…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
As Machine Learning (ML) is now widely applied in many domains, in both research and industry, an understanding of what is happening inside the black box is becoming a growing demand, especially by non-experts of these models. Several…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
Individuals are often influenced by the behavior of others, for instance because they wish to obtain the benefits of coordinated actions or infer otherwise inaccessible information. In such situations this social influence decreases the ex…
How should social scientists understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated causal effects? I propose we utilize the posterior distribution of a causal effect and present the probability of the effect being greater…