Attraction by ingroup coherence explains the emergence of ideological sorting

Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to understand the conditions under which people tend to endorse extreme opinions. However, in polarized contexts, citizens not only adopt more extreme views but also become more correlated across issues which are, a priori, seemingly unrelated. This phenomenon, known as 'ideological sorting', has been increasing in recent years but the micro-level mechanisms underlying its emergence remain poorly understood. Here, we study the conditions under which a social dynamic system is expected to become ideologically sorted as a function of the mechanisms of interaction between its individuals. To this end, we developed and analyzed a multidimensional agent-based model that incorporates two mechanisms: homophily (where people tend to interact with those holding similar opinions) and ingroup-coherence favoritism (where people tend to interact with ingroups holding politically coherent opinions). We developed and solved the model's master equations that perfectly describe the system's dynamics and found that ideological sorting only emerges in models that include ingroup-coherence favoritism. We then compared the model's outcomes with empirical data proceeding from 24,035 opinions across 67 topics, and found that ingroup-coherence favoritism is significantly present in datasets that measure political attitudes, but it is absent across non-political topics. Overall, this work combines theoretical approaches from system dynamics with model-based analyses of empirical data to uncover a potential mechanism underlying the pervasiveness of ideological sorting

Polarizing crowds: Consensus and bipolarization in a persuasive arguments model

Understanding the opinion formation dynamics in social systems is of vast relevance in diverse aspects of society. In particular, it is relevant for political deliberation and other group decision-making processes. Although previous research has reported different approaches to model social dynamics, most of them focused on interaction mechanisms where individuals modify their opinions in line with the opinions of others, without invoking a latent mechanism of argumentation. In this paper, we present a model where changes of opinion are due to explicit exchanges of arguments, and we analyze the emerging collective states in terms of simple dynamic rules. We find that, when interactions are equiprobable and symmetrical, the model only shows consensus solutions. However, when either homophily, confirmation bias, or both are included, we observe the emergence and dominance of bipolarization, which appears due to the fact that individuals are not able to accept the contrary information from their opponents during exchanges of arguments. In all cases, the predominance of each stable state depends on the relation between the number of agents and the number of available arguments in the discussion. Overall, this paper describes the dynamics and shows the conditions wherein deliberative agents are expected to construct polarized societies.Fil: Barrera Lemarchand, Federico Ulises. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Semeshenko, Viktoriya. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Navajas, Joaquín. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Balenzuela, Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity

Affective polarization and political segregation have become a serious threat to democratic societies. One standard explanation for these phenomena is that people like and prefer interacting with similar others. However, similarity may not be the only driver of interpersonal liking in the political domain, and other factors, yet to be uncovered, could play an important role. Here, we hypothesized that beyond the effect of similarity, people show greater preference for individuals with politically coherent and confident opinions. To test this idea, we performed two behavioral studies consisting of one-shot face-to-face pairwise interactions. We found that people with ambiguous or ambivalent views were nonreciprocally attracted to confident and coherent ingroups. A third experimental study confirmed that politically coherent and confident profiles are rated as more attractive than targets with ambiguous or ambivalent opinions. Overall, these findings unfold the key drivers of the affability between people who discuss politics.Fil: Zimmerman, Federico Guido. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Garbulsky, Gerry. No especifíca;Fil: Ariely, Dan. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Universidad Nebrija; EspañaFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentin

Understanding quality judgements of red wines by experts: Effect of evaluation condition

The effect of evaluation condition on quality judgements of wine experts was evaluated. Quality perceived by wine experts was investigated under the assumption that this construct is built from multimodal sensory inputs. Twenty-one wine experts from Rioja (Spain) scored the intrinsic quality of 16 Spanish red wines under four conditions: (i) visual stimulation only, (ii) orthonasal olfaction alone, (iii) in-mouth sensations only (wearing a nose clip) and (iv) global tasting. Agreement among judges and the effect of evaluation condition were evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA) and ANOVA, respectively. In parallel, a trained panel described aroma, taste and in-mouth sensory properties such as astringency, global intensity and persistence. CIELab colour coordinates were also obtained. These descriptive data were submitted to regression analyses to explore their relationship with quality scores derived from the four evaluation conditions. Common mental representations of wine quality under visual, olfactory and global conditions were confirmed, while there was not a clear quality construct based exclusively on taste and mouthfeel properties. Wine taste and mouth-feel quality concept is suggested to be built only in combination with aroma and/or colour stimuli, and thus within a wine context. Global quality judgement integrated information provided by visual and olfactory cues, even if olfactory stimuli were suggested to have more importance on the construction of the global quality concept of wine experts. Significant interactions between wine and evaluation condition revealed significant differences in quality scores dependent on the stimuli received during tasting and on the wine judged. Sensory cues driving quality, especially visual and in-mouth properties varied depending on the evaluation condition, which suggested that global wine quality concept would be the result of the integration of perceptual and cognitive information rather than a collection of independent stimuli

The wisdom of extremized crowds: Promoting erroneous divergent opinions increases collective accuracy

The aggregation of many lay judgements can generate surprisingly accurate estimates. This effect, known as the “wisdom of the crowd”, has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision-making, factchecking news, and financial forecasting. Therefore, understanding the conditions that enhance the wisdom of the crowd has become a crucial issue in the social and behavioral sciences. Previous theoretical research identified two key factors driving this effect: the accuracy of individuals and the diversity of their opinions. Most available strategies to enhance the wisdom of the crowd have exclusively focused on improving individual accuracy while neglecting the potential of increasing opinion diversity. Here, we study a complementary approach to reduce collective error by promoting divergent and extreme opinions, using a cognitive bias called the “anchoring effect”. This method proposes to anchor half of the crowd to an extremely small value and the other half to an extremely large value before eliciting and averaging their estimates. As predicted by our mathematical modeling, three behavioral experiments demonstrate that this strategy concurrently increases individual error, opinion diversity, and collectively accuracy. Most remarkably, we show that this approach works even in a forecasting task where the experimenters did not know the correct answer at the time of testing. Overall, these results not only provide practitioners with a new strategy to forecast and estimate variables but also have strong theoretical implications on the epistemic value of collective decision-making

Fibroblast viability and phenotypic changes within glycated stiffened three-dimensional collagen matrices

Background: There is growing interest in the development of cell culture assays that enable the rigidity of the extracellular matrix to be increased. A promising approach is based on three-dimensional collagen type I matrices that are stiffened by cross-linking through non-enzymatic glycation with reducing sugars. Methods: The present study evaluated the biomechanical changes in the non-enzymatically glycated type I collagen matrices, including collagen organization, the advanced glycation end products formation and stiffness achievement. Gels were glycated with ribose at different concentrations (0, 5, 15, 30 and 240 mM). The viability and the phenotypic changes of primary human lung fibroblasts cultured within the non-enzymatically glycated gels were also evaluated along three consecutive weeks. Statistical tests used for data analyze were MannWhitney U, Kruskal Wallis, Student's t-test, two-way ANOVA, multivariate ANOVA, linear regression test and mixed linear model. Results: Our findings indicated that the process of collagen glycation increases the stiffness of the matrices and generates advanced glycation end products in a ribose concentration-dependent manner. Furthermore, we identified optimal ribose concentrations and media conditions for cell viability and growth within the glycated matrices. The microenvironment of this collagen based three-dimensional culture induces α-smooth muscle actin and tenascin-C fibroblast protein expression. Finally, a progressive contractile phenotype cell differentiation was associated with the contraction of these gels. Conclusions: The use of non-enzymatic glycation with a low ribose concentration may provide a suitable model with a mechanic and oxidative modified environment with cell s embedded in it, which allowed cell proliferation and induced fibroblast phenotypic changes. Such culture model could be appropriate for investigations of the behavior and phenotypic changes in cells that occur during lung fibrosis as well as for testing different antifibrotic therapies in vitro

The Open Anchoring Quest Dataset: Anchored Estimates from 96 Studies on Anchoring Effects

People’s estimates are biased toward previously considered numbers (anchoring). We have aggregated all available data from anchoring studies that included at least two anchors into one large dataset. Data were standardized to comprise one estimate per row, coded according to a wide range of variables, and are available for download and analyses online (https://metaanalyses.shinyapps.io/OpAQ/). Because the dataset includes both original and meta-data it allows for fine-grained analyses (e.g., correlations of estimates for different tasks) but also for meta-analyses (e.g., effect sizes for anchoring effects)

Adelante / Endavant

Séptimo desafío por la erradicación de la violencia contra las mujeres del Institut Universitari d’Estudis Feministes i de Gènere "Purificación Escribano" de la Universitat Jaume

Extremizing Judgements Produces More Inaccurate Individuals but Wiser Crowds

The crowd wisdom effect is a well-established phenomenon that is widely employed for predicting and estimating variables across various domains. Previous research has focused on enhancing the wisdom of crowds by improving individual estimates while maintaining some of the initial opinion diversity. However, it is theoretically possible to increase collective accuracy by largely increasing the diversity in a crowd. In this study, we propose a method that leverages the anchoring effect to extremize individual judgments and thus increase the diversity of opinions in a crowd. This is achieved by dividing the crowd into two groups, anchoring each group to either a low or high value, and aggregating all estimates. We use a mathematical model of anchoring to determine when this strategy is expected to outperform the crowd wisdom effect. Results from three experiments provide converging evidence that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in estimating and forecasting unknown quantities