Opinions and Social Pressure

Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions

The formation of agents’ opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand, the concurrent participation of agents to discussions on different topics induces each agent to develop a coherent set of opinions across all the topics in w...

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Influence of media on collective debates

The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing on how the current inner strategies of the information system (competition, customer satisfaction) once combined with the gossip may affect the opinions’ dy...

Social Pressure in Opinion Games

Motivated by privacy and security concerns in online social networks, we study the role of social pressure in opinion games. These are games, important in economics and sociology, that model the formation of opinions in a social network. We enrich the definition of (noisy) best-response dynamics for opinion games by introducing the pressure, increasing with time, to reach an agreement. We prove...

Characterizing diabetes, diet, exercise, and obesity comments on Twitter

Social media provide a platform for users to express their opinions and share information. Understanding public health opinions on social media, such as Twitter, offers a unique approach to characterizing common health issues such as diabetes, diet, exercise, and obesity (DDEO); however, collecting and analyzing a large scale conversational public health data set is a challenging research task....

Consensus on Social Graphs under Increasing Peer Pressure

In this paper, we present a novel generalized framework for expressing peer influence dynamics over time in a set of connected individuals, or agents. The proposed framework supports the representation of individual variability through parametrization accounting for differences in susceptibility to peer influence and pairwise relationship strengths. Modeling agents’ opinions and behaviors as st...