The effects of interpersonal interactions on individual’s agreements result in a social aggregation process which is reflected in the formation of collective states, as for instance, groups of individuals with a similar opinion about a given issue. This field, which has been a longstanding concern of sociologists and psychologists, has been extended into an area of experimental social psycholog...

Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct perspectives, namely how cognitive biases lead to individual belief rigidity and how social influence leads to social conformity. Here we propose a unifying ...

BACKGROUND In schizophrenia, social cognition is strongly linked to functional outcome and is increasingly seen as a viable treatment target. The goal of the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE) study is to identify and improve the best existing measures of social cognition so they can be suitably applied in large-scale treatment studies. Initial phases of this project sought to (1)...

This paper proposes a new consensus model in participatory decision making. The model employs advice centrality approach by electing a leader and recommender named as Supra Decision Maker (SDM). A SDM has a role as a decision bench-marker to other decision makers in evaluating each alternative with respect to given criteria. The weighting value for each alternative can be obtained by considerin...

There is a growing consensus among urban analysts that inner-city neighborhoods suffer from a lack of social capital. Because these areas do not have a strong social infrastructure in place to support successful revitalization efforts, urban policy recommendations now call for developing social capital in the worst-off parts of our cities. However, this consensus has been reached without any em...

This paper applies the theory of networks to the problem of how agents should assign weights to other agents in the Lehrer-Wagner model for consensus formation. The LehrerWagner theory of consensus is introduced, and the problem of weight assignment is highlighted as one of the open problems for the theory. The paper argues that the application of the theory of networks to the Lehrer-Wagner mod...

We study the dynamics of the Naming Game [Baronchelli et al., (2006) J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. P06014] in empirical social networks. This stylized agent-based model captures essential features of agreement dynamics in a network of autonomous agents, corresponding to the development of shared classification schemes in a network of artificial agents or opinion spreading and social dynamics in s...