Research in sociology studies the effectiveness of social networks in achieving computational tasks. Typically the agents who are supposed to achieve a task are unaware of the underlying social network except their immediate friends. They have limited memory, communication, and coordination. These limitations result in computational obstacles in achieving otherwise trivial computational problem...

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Research on human reasoning is dominated by demonstrations of the errors people make in various judgment and decision-making tasks. The area of social cognition is not an exception: the list of apparent errors is long and includes a number of contradictory phenomena. Here we explore a prominent example of the contradictory pairs of biases: false consensus and false uniqueness. We show in an emp...

What is the effect of the combined direct and indirect social influences--peer pressure (PP)--on a social group's collective decisions? We present a model that captures PP as a function of the socio-cultural distance between individuals in a social group. Using this model and empirical data from 15 real-world social networks we found that the PP level determines how fast a social group reaches ...

We study a simple voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two competitors or to remain neutral. People interact in a social network and their opinion depends on those of their neighbors. Therefore, people may change opinion over time, i.e., they can support one competitor or none. The two ...

The topological structure of many real networks changes with time. Thus, locating the sources of a temporal network is a creative and challenging problem, as the enormous size of many real networks makes it unfeasible to observe the state of all nodes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to solve this problem, named the backward temporal diffusion process. The proposed algorithm calculates t...