#opiniondynamics — Public Fediverse posts

New paper out.

What happens when you make a model that includes realistic details about how people discuss ideas and decide how to act upon them? The answer is that with just 3 such elements of realism, one can mathematically explain the emergence of commonly observed situations, such as reaching a consensus and exchanging opinions, but also the separation of ideologies and the appearance of stable polarization. Not only this, but one can also account for phenomena such as peer pressure, cognitive dissonance, tactical voting and toxic idealism ( @benroyce I told you I was going to do it 😀 ) and prove how they affect the final state of the system.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077924015352

#physics #mathematics #networks #bifurcations #opiniondynamics #consensus #polarization #voting #peerpressure #cognitivedissonance #tacticalvoting #toxicidealism

#publication : Can a Single Line of Code Change Society? The Systemic Risks of Optimizing Engagement in Recommender Systems on Global Information Flow, Opinion Dynamics and Social Structures

We demonstrate that engagement-maximizing algorithms necessarily lead to increased network toxicity and fragmentation of opinion space.

Everything is calibrated on real data from the #Politoscope

#systemicrisks #DSA #opiniondynamics #twitter #polarization #RecommenderSystems

https://www.jasss.org/27/1/9.html