The psycholinguistic theory of Communication Accommodation proposes that people modify communication dynamics (e.g. vocal patterns, gesture, word choice, syntax, etc.) to minimize (or maximize) their social differences. Research on communication accommodation has shown that people who want social approval will modify their linguistic style to match that of their interactant; however, most studi...

As Duckworth and Kern (2011) note, currently over 1% of the abstracts in PsycInfo are indexed by "selfcontrol" or one its synonyms. As part of this widespread interest, cognitive and neural scientists are debating the psychological mechanisms of self-control (Ainslie, 1975; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), and the implementation of these mechanisms in the brain (Figner, et...

Can people influence others solely by virtue of shared group membership? To address this and related questions, we offer a theory of group-mediated social influence and then test it in a standardized collective task setting. The theory capitalizes on uncertainty reduction principles found in two longstanding social psychological traditions: social identity theory and status characteristics theo...

In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing the negative influence of undesirable things in a network by blocking a limited number of nodes from a topic modeling perspective. When undesirable thing such as a rumor or an infection emerges in a social network and part of users have already been infected, our goal is to minimize the size of ultimately infected users by blocking k nodes out...

Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As online social networks have become significant sources of information for potential voters, a new tool in an attacker’s arsenal is to effect control by harnessi...

Andersson, M. (2009). Social influence in stock markets. Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Influences by others when making investments and predictions in stock markets, referred to as herding, is a widely discussed phenomenon in financial economics. This thesis aims to understand herding by applying theories of social influence. In a series of studies employing a multi...

We consider a model of influence with a set of non-strategic agents and two strategic agents. The non-strategic agents have initial opinions and are linked through a simply connected network. They update their opinions as in the DeGroot model. The two strategic agents have fixed and opposed opinions. They each form a link with a non-strategic agent in order to influence the average opinion that...

Social recommendation, that an individual recommends an item to another, has gained popularity and success in web applications such as online sharing and shopping services. It is largely different from a traditional recommendation where an automatic system recommends an item to a user. In a social recommendation, the interpersonal influence plays a critical role but is usually ignored in tradit...

Nowadays, people conduct a lot of activities with their online social networks. With the large amount of social data available, quantitative analysis of social influence becomes feasible. In this PhD project, we aim to study users’ social influence at the community level, mainly because users in social networks are naturally organized in communities and communities play fundamental roles in und...

C) Figure 2: The Refine and Abstract operations.