Dear all,

Apart from the regular LIRa session scheduled for tomorrow (Nina Gierasimczuk) and advertised earlier today, we would like to bring to your attention the following two talks of DIEP (Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena) which might be of interest to the LIRa audience. The talks are by Sven Banisch (tomorrow) and by Olivier Roy (May 27). You can find the details of the talks, as well as the zoom links, below.

Date and time: Thursday, May 20th 2021, 11:00-12:30, Amsterdam time.

Speaker: Sven Banisch (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig)

Title: Social Feedback Theory: Modeling collective opinion phenomena by learning from the feedback of others

Abstract: Humans are sensitive to social approval and disapproval. The feedback that others provide on our expressions of opinion is an important driver for adaptation and change. Social feedback theory provides a framework for modeling collective opinion processes based on these principles. The theory departs from previous models by differentiating an externally expressed opinion from an internal evaluation of it. Opinion dynamics is conceived as repeated games that agents play within their social network and to which they adapt by reward-based learning. Within this setting, game theoretic notions of equilibrium can be used to characterize structural conditions for qualitatively different regimes of collective opinion expression. In this talk, I aim for a broad perspective and discuss two models addressing emergent phenomena such as polarization and collective silence.

Zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/85608909905

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Date and time: Thursday, May 27th 2021, 11:00-12:30, Amsterdam time.

Speaker: Olivier Roy (Bayreuth University)

Title: Deliberation, Coherent Aggregation, and Anchoring

Abstract: In this talk we will present a number of results stemming from a computational model of collective attitude formation through a combination of group deliberation and aggregation. In this model the participants repeatedly exchange and update their preferences over small sets of alternatives, until they reach a stable preference profile. When they do so the collective attitude is computed by pairwise majority voting. The model shows, on the one hand, that rational preference change can fill an existing gap in known mechanisms purported to explain how deliberation can help avoiding incoherent group preferences. On the other hand, the model also reveals that when the participants are sufficiently biased towards their own opinion, deliberation can actually create incoherent group rankings, against the received view. The model suggests furthermore that rational deliberation can exhibit high levels of path dependencies or “anchoring”, where the group opinion is strongly dependent on the order in which the participants contribute to the discussion. We will finish by discussing possible trade-offs between such positive and negative features of group deliberation.   Zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/85608909905

Hope to see you there!

The LIRa team