Adolescent peer groups with pro-drinking group norms are a well-established source of influence for alcohol initiation and use. However, classic experimental studies of social influence, namely ‘minority influence’, clearly indicate social situations in which an individual can resist...

The present paper shows that when a person has the experience of giving advice but that advice is not acted upon, there is a reduced openness to external information. We call this the “referral backfire effect”. We argue that this referral backfire effect is due to the identity threatening...

This research reports a comparative analysis of the communication strategy that forest owners' associations across Europe use to influence society on one side and the decision-makers on the other, in order to fulfill forest owners' interests. 60% of Europe's forests are privately owned by an...

To maintain stability yet retain the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, social systems must strike a balance between the maintenance of a shared reality and the survival of minority opinion. A computational model is presented that investigates the interplay of two basic,...

How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers of others. While the response of humans to aggregated...

We introduce the concept of temperature as an order parameter in the standard Axelrod’s social influence model. It is defined as the relation between suitably defined entropy and energy functions, T=(∂S/∂E)−1. We show that at the critical point, where the order/disorder transition...

We show that the Matthew effect, or Matthew mechanism, was present in the artificial cultural market Music Lab in one-fourth of the “worlds” when social influence between individuals was allowed, whereas this effect was not present in the “world” that disallowed social influence between...

The study explores the evolution of decision strategies and the emergence of cooperation in simulated societies. In the context of an inter-group conflict, we simulate three different institutions for the aggregation of attitudes. We assume that: (a) the conflict can be modeled as an iterated...

Poor sanitation, including the lack of clean functioning toilets, is a major factor contributing to morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases in the developing world.

Adolescent peer groups with pro-drinking group norms are a well-established source of influence for alcohol initiation and use. However, classic experimental studies of social influence, namely ’minority influence’, clearly indicate social situations in which an individual can resist...