210,453 research outputs found
Events and Controversies: Influences of a Shocking News Event on Information Seeking
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the
intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where
people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are
infrequently encountered. This so-called "filter bubble" phenomenon has been
called out as especially detrimental when it comes to dialog among people on
controversial, emotionally charged topics, such as the labeling of genetically
modified food, the right to bear arms, the death penalty, and online privacy.
We seek to identify and study information-seeking behavior and access to
alternative versus reinforcing viewpoints following shocking, emotional, and
large-scale news events. We choose for a case study to analyze search and
browsing on gun control/rights, a strongly polarizing topic for both citizens
and leaders of the United States. We study the period of time preceding and
following a mass shooting to understand how its occurrence, follow-on
discussions, and debate may have been linked to changes in the patterns of
searching and browsing. We employ information-theoretic measures to quantify
the diversity of Web domains of interest to users and understand the browsing
patterns of users. We use these measures to characterize the influence of news
events on these web search and browsing patterns
Modeling Evolutionary Dynamics of Lurking in Social Networks
Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in all
large-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to the
behavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced by
others in the community without actively contributing back to the production of
social content. The amount and evolution of lurkers may strongly affect an
online social environment, therefore understanding the lurking dynamics and
identifying strategies to curb this trend are relevant problems. In this
regard, we introduce the Lurker Game, i.e., a model for analyzing the
transitions from a lurking to a non-lurking (i.e., active) user role, and vice
versa, in terms of evolutionary game theory. We evaluate the proposed Lurker
Game by arranging agents on complex networks and analyzing the system
evolution, seeking relations between the network topology and the final
equilibrium of the game. Results suggest that the Lurker Game is suitable to
model the lurking dynamics, showing how the adoption of rewarding mechanisms
combined with the modeling of hypothetical heterogeneity of users' interests
may lead users in an online community towards a cooperative behavior.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at CompleNet 201
Graduate Catalog, 2005-2006
https://scholar.valpo.edu/gradcatalogs/1032/thumbnail.jp
Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data
Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on
partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different
moral valuations. The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a
spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel
or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation. Here
we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter
individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are
in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data. The main
conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive
strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that
this connection arises from interactions between agents. Thus a simple
interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data
on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures
consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as
obtained by survey studies of social psychology.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 C codes, to appear in Advances in Complex
System
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