Consensus, self-other agreement, and meta-accuracy were studied within and across nonoverlapping social groups. Thirty-one target persons were judged on the Big Five factors by 9 informants: 3 family members, 3 friends, and 3 coworkers. Although well acquainted within groups, informants were unacquainted between groups. A social relations analysis conducted within each social group showed relia...

This article reports on the evolution of network structure as it relates to formal and informal social roles in well-bounded, isolated groups. Research was conducted at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Data were collected on crewmembers' networks of social interaction over each of three winter-over periods, when the station is completely isolated. In addition, data were collected on the i...

Law often grows from social norms that create order. Many social norms change behavior by imposing obligations on people. I model the evolution of effective consensus obligations. Some consensus obligations succeed on their own and others require the backing of state law. This paper analyzes the causes of normative failure and provides a diagnostic tool for legal intervention. Characterizing fa...

Previous research has demonstrated the importance of cognitive social network structures to better understanding human behavior and thought. Yet network members may deviate in perceiving whether relations exist between pairs of nodes in a network, which can present a challenge in modeling cognitive consensus structures. It has been suggested to define cognitive consensus structures (CCS) to yie...

Reaching some form of consensus is often necessary for autonomous agents that want to coordinate their actions or otherwise engage in joint activities. One way to reach a consensus is by aggregating individual information, such as decisions, beliefs, preferences and constraints. Judgment aggregation is a social choice method, which generalises voting , that studies the aggregation of individual...

Modern social choice theory has spurred considerable recent work in computational rank aggregation, the problem of aggregating rankings into a consensus ranking. However, in the social choice context where rankings represent preferences of agents, or “voters,” over outcomes, or “candidates,” there is scant justification in the literature for producing rankings as an output of the aggregation pr...

The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgment. This centenarian finding , popularly known as the “wisdom of crowds”, has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to financial forecasting. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Here, ...

In the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, it is important to predict which individual opinions eventually dominate in a large population, whether there will be a consensus, and how long it takes for a consensus to form. Such ideas have been studied heavily both in physics and in other disciplines, and the answers depend strongly both on how one models opinions and on the network structu...

We investigate intrasocietal consensus and variation in affective meanings of concepts related to authority and community, two elementary forms of human sociality. Survey participants (n = 2,849) from different socioeconomic status (SES) groups in German society provided ratings of 909 social concepts along three basic dimensions of affective meaning. Results show widespread consensus on these ...

We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate information. In our model, each individual in a network holds a private, independent opinion about a product or idea, biased toward a ground truth. Individuals declare...