Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation

Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears during epidemics. Yet, the mechanisms of opinion formation remain poorly understood, and existing physics-based models lack systematic empirical validation. Here, we report two controlled experiments showing how participants answering factual questions revise their initial judgments after being exposed to the opinion and confidence level of others. Based on the observation of 59 experimental subjects exposed to peer-opinion for 15 different items, we draw an influence map that describes the strength of peer influence during interactions. A simple process model derived from our observations demonstrates how opinions in a group of interacting people can converge or split over repeated interactions. In particular, we identify two major attractors of opinion: (i) the expert effect, induced by the presence of a highly confident individual in the group, and (ii) the majority effect, caused by the presence of a critical mass of laypeople sharing similar opinions. Additional simulations reveal the existence of a tipping point at which one attractor will dominate over the other, driving collective opinion in a given direction. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of public opinion formation and managing conflicting situations in which self-confident and better informed minorities challenge the views of a large uninformed majority.Comment: Published Nov 05, 2013. Open access at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.007843

Integrating Personality And Emotion For Human Crowd Simulation

Existing research attempts to create realistic crowd simulations by incorporating personality and emotion into intelligent agents. However, personality and emotion were considered separately in existing studies, where the interactions of them are ignored. The main objective of this paper is to propose and implement a framework for crowd simulation with integration of the impacts and interactions of personality and emotion. An interactive solution based on the proposed framework is also developed for visualizing the crowd navigation behavior and collecting the related trajectory data. Three simulated scenarios: pass through, narrow passage, and emergence situation are used to validate the framework and compare the results with recent studies

Psychological and Socio-Psychological Factors in Behavioral Simulation of Human Crowds

This paper aims to synthesis existing research efforts to provide an integrated view of behavioral model designs and relevant theoretical frameworks of heterogeneous agents for crowd simulations. Most existing studies considered only limited parameters by including a few selected personalities traits, emotion, and group characteristics for specific scenarios and applications. Most often, these factors are implemented with limited reference to theoretical psychology and cognitive models. This study attempts to synthesis existing research effort and outlines opportunities, challenges, and promising areas for future research for integrating psychological and socio-psychological factors in crowd behavior simulations

Modeling human and organizational behavior using a relation-centric multi-agent system design paradigm

Today's modeling and simulation communities are being challenged to create rich, detailed models incorporating human decision-making and organizational behavior. Recent advances in distributed artificial intelligence and complex systems theory have demonstrated that such ill-defined problems can be effectively modeled with agent-based simulation techniques using multiple, autonomoous, adaptive entities. RELATE, a relation-centric design paradigm for multi-agent systems (MAS), is presented to assist developers incorporate MAS solutions into their simulations. RELATe focuses the designer on six key concepts of MAS simulations: relationships, environment, laws, agents, things, and effectors. A library of Java classes is presented which enables the user to rapidly prototype an agent-based simulation. This library utilizes the Java programming language to support cross-platform and web based designs. All Java classes and interfaces are fully documented using HTML Javadoc format. Two reference cases are provided that allow for easy code reuse and modification. Finally, an existing metworked DIS-Java-VRML simulation was modified to demonstrate the ability to utilize the RELATE library to add agents to existing applications. LCDR Kim Roddy focused on the development and refinement of the RELATE design paradigm, while LT Mike Dickson focused on the actual Java implementation. Joint work was conducted on all research and reference caseshttp://www.archive.org/details/modelinghumanorg00roddU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) author

Implications and Ramifications of a Sample-Size Approach to Intuition

[...from the chapter] In the present article, we delineate a different approach, which is by no means inconsistent, but largely overlaps with the aforementioned definitions. However, our approach is simpler and refrains from a number of rather strong assumptions to which other conceptions subscribe. Using a simple and straightforward criterion, we define intuition in terms of the size of the sample used in reaching a decision: Judgments and decisions are intuitive to the extent that they rest on small samples.

Bio-Inspired Virtual Populations: Adaptive Behavior with Affective Feedback

In this paper, we describe an agency model for generative populations of humanoid characters, based upon temporal variation of affective states. We have built on an existing agent framework from Sequeira et al. [17], and adapted it to be susceptible to temperamental and emotive states in the context of cooperative and non-cooperative interactions based on trading activity. More specifically, this model operates within two existing frameworks: a) intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning, structured upon affective appraisals in the relationship of the agents with their environment [19,17]; b) a multi-temporal representation of individual psychology, common in the field of affective computing, structuring individual psychology as a tripartite relationship: emotions-moods-personality [7,15]. Results show a populations of agents that express their individuality and autonomy with a high level of heterogeneous and spontaneous behaviors, while simultaneously adapting and overcoming their perceptual limitations