Volume 2 Issue 6, June 2018

Online communication has become integral to modern political behaviour — to the extent that events online both reflect and influence actions offline. A study uses geolocated Twitter data to argue that moralization of protests leads to violent protests and increased support for violence.

Aral and Dhillon specify a class of empirically motivated influence maximization models that incorporate more realistic features of real-world social networks and predict substantially greater influence propagation compared with traditional models.

Kaplan and colleagues find that, in virtual foraging environments in which resource availability is variable, over time, tolerated theft of the resources of others declines, as participants endogenously develop reciprocal exchange relationships to buffer risk.

By analysing the language of tweets around protests in Baltimore in 2015 and through behavioural laboratory experiments, Dehghani and colleagues find that moralization of protest issues leads to greater support for violence and increased incidence of violent protest.

Nowak and colleagues present a game theoretic model that explains how behaviours like subtlety, modesty and anonymous good deeds can be maintained under the standard model of reputation building and indirect reciprocity.

Lindström and Tobler find that ostracism of individuals can emerge incidentally, based on initial group structure, and is propagated by a simple reinforcement learning mechanism. The same mechanism can be used to reduce incidental ostracism.

Analytis et al. study social learning strategies for matters of taste and test their performance on a large-scale dataset. They show why a strategy’s success depends both on people’s level of experience and how their tastes relate to those of others.