OPINION DYNAMICS AND COLLECTIVE DECISIONS

Jan Lorenz and Martin Neumann ()
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Jan Lorenz: Bremen International Graduate School for Social Sciences (BIGSSS), Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany2Computational Social Science Department, GESIS Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne, Germany
Martin Neumann: Johannes-Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2018, vol. 21, issue 06n07, 1-9

Abstract: We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are produced by voting procedures which aggregate individual preferences and judgments. Before and after, individual preferences and judgments change as their underlying attitudes, values, and opinions change through discussion and deliberation. In large groups, these dynamics naturally go beyond the scope of the individual and consequently might show unexpected self-driven macroscopic systems dynamics following socio-physical laws. On the other hand, aggregated information and preferences as communicated through media, polls, political parties, or interest groups, also play a large role in the individual opinion formation process. Further on, actors are also capable of strategic opinion formation in the light of a pending referendum, election or other collective decision. Opinion dynamics and collective decision should thus not only be tackled by social choice, game theory, political and social psychology, but also from a systems dynamics and sociophysics perspective.

Keywords: Opinion dynamics; collective decisions; social choice; agent-based modeling; social influence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525918020022

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