Humans often adjust their opinions to the perceived opinions of others. Neural responses to a perceived match or mismatch between individual and group opinions have been investigated previously, but some findings are inconsistent. In this study, we used magnetoencephalographic source imaging to investigate further neural responses to the perceived opinions of others. We found that group opinion...

Nearly four out of every five federal court of appeals opinions are unpublished. For more than twenty-five years, judges and scholars have debated the wisdom and fairness of this body of "secret" law. The debate over unpublished opinions recently intensified when the Eighth Circuit held that the Constitution requires courts to give these opinions precedential value. Despite continuing controver...

In previous continuous opinion dynamics models based on bounded confidence assumptions, individuals can only influence each other’s opinions when those opinions are sufficiently close; subsequently, agents construct their self-opinions using opinions collected from other agents. All of these models lack the element of an agent’s inner self-attitude. In this paper we describe our proposal for a ...

We investigated the impact of peers' opinions on the smoking initiation process among adolescents. We applied the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model to study how social interactions change adolescents' opinions and behaviors about smoking. Through agent-based modeling (ABM), we simulated a population of 2500 adolescents and compared smoking prevalence to data from 9 cohorts o...

In this paper, we provide the first empirical evidence of fairness opinions in Europe. Legal requirements concerning the use of fairness opinions in mergers and acquisitions are significantly different in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. We examine the determinants of target fairness opinions in these various regulatory settings and, moreover, investigate the impact of such opinions on abnorm...

Information-based agents use tools from information theory to evaluate their utterances and to build their world model. When embedded in a social network these agents measure the strength of information flow in this sense. This leads to a model of information-based reputation in which agents share opinions, and observe the way in which their opinions effect the opinions of others. A method is p...

In this article we derive implications about social positions from a formal theory of social influence. The formal theory describes how, in a group of actors with heterogeneous initial opinions, a network of interpersonal influences enters into the formation of actors' settled opinions. We derive the following conclusions about a special form of structural equivalence. If actors are structurall...

When individuals in social groups communicate with one another and are under the influence of neighbors' opinions, they typically revise their own opinions to adapt to such peer opinions. The individual threshold of bounded confidence will thus be affected by both a change in individual confidence and by neighbor influence. Individuals thus update their own opinions with new bounded confidence,...

Social media are part of our everyday lives. These technologies allow people to share their opinions with others. Here I examine whether the opinions posted online actually change people’s perception of the world or they simply serve as anchors when people post their own opinions. Participants rated the interestingness of given stories. In one condition, the stories were presented with invented...

We propose a novel community communication system called Public Opinion Channel (POC). Existing communication systems have limitations on eliciting and circulating opinions from community members because communication costs for receiving, sending, and selecting information are high. To augment social intelligence of a community, (1) eliciting diverse opinions from community members, and (2) cir...