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Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to understand under which conditions people tend to endorse extreme opinions. However, in polarized contexts, citizens not only adopt more extreme views but also become correlated across issues that are, a priori, seemingly unrelated. This phenomenon, known as "ideological sorting", has been receiving greater attention in recent years but the micro-level mechanisms underlying its emergence remain poorly understood. Here, we study the conditions under which a social dynamic system is expected to become ideologically sorted as a function of the mechanisms of interaction between its individuals. To this end, we developed and analyzed a multidimensional agent-based model that incorporates two mechanisms: homophily (where people tend to interact with those holding similar opinions) and pairwise-coherence favoritism (where people tend to interact with ingroups holding politically coherent opinions). We numerically integrated the model's master equations that perfectly describe the system's dynamics and found that ideological sorting only emerges in models that include pairwise-coherence favoritism. We then compared the model's outcomes with empirical data from 24,035 opinions across 67 topics and found that pairwise-coherence favoritism is significantly present in datasets that measure political attitudes but absent across topics not considered related to politics. Overall, this work combines theoretical approaches from system dynamics with model-based analyses of empirical data to uncover a potential mechanism underlying the pervasiveness of ideological sorting.

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Classic and recent studies demonstrate how we fall for the 'tyranny of the majority' and conform to the dominant trend when uncertain. However, in many social interactions outside of the laboratory, there is rarely a clearly identified majority and discerning who to follow might be challenging. Here, we asked whether in such conditions herding behaviour depends on a key statistical property of social information: the variance of opinions in a group. We selected a task domain where opinions are widely variable and asked participants (N = 650) to privately estimate the price of eight anonymous paintings. Then, in groups of five, they discussed and agreed on a shared estimate for four paintings. Finally, they provided revised individual estimates for all paintings. As predicted (https://osf.io/s89w4), we observed that group members converged to each other and boosted their confidence following social interaction. We also found evidence supporting the hypothesis that the more diverse groups show greater convergence, suggesting that the variance of opinions promotes herding in uncertain crowds. Overall, these findings empirically examine how, in the absence of a clear majority, the distribution of opinions relates to subjective feelings of confidence and herding behaviour.

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Affective polarization and political segregation have become a serious threat to democratic societies. One standard explanation for these phenomena is that people like and prefer interacting with similar others. However, similarity may not be the only driver of interpersonal liking in the political domain, and other factors, yet to be uncovered, could play an important role. Here, we hypothesized that beyond the effect of similarity, people show greater preference for individuals with politically coherent and confident opinions. To test this idea, we performed two behavioral studies consisting of one-shot face-to-face pairwise interactions. We found that people with ambiguous or ambivalent views were nonreciprocally attracted to confident and coherent ingroups. A third experimental study confirmed that politically coherent and confident profiles are rated as more attractive than targets with ambiguous or ambivalent opinions. Overall, these findings unfold the key drivers of the affability between people who discuss politics.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. Here, we study how people judge a set of controversial actions related to the crisis: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who violated COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We collected acceptability judgements in an initial large-scale study with participants from 10 Latin American countries (N = 15 420). A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas revealed that judgements were organized in two dimensions: one that reflects a focus on human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. These stereotyped patterns of responses were stronger in people who endorsed utilitarian decisions in a standardized scale. A second pre-registered study performed in the USA (N = 1300) confirmed the replicability of these findings. Finally, we show how the prioritization of public health correlated with several contextual, personality and demographic factors. Overall, this research sheds light on the relationship between utilitarian decision-making and moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

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Understanding the opinion formation dynamics in social systems is of vast relevance in diverse aspects of society. In particular, it is relevant for political deliberation and other group decision-making processes. Although previous research has reported different approaches to model social dynamics, most of them focused on interaction mechanisms where individuals modify their opinions in line with the opinions of others, without invoking a latent mechanism of argumentation. In this paper, we present a model where changes of opinion are due to explicit exchanges of arguments, and we analyze the emerging collective states in terms of simple dynamic rules. We find that, when interactions are equiprobable and symmetrical, the model only shows consensus solutions. However, when either homophily, confirmation bias, or both are included, we observe the emergence and dominance of bipolarization, which appears due to the fact that individuals are not able to accept the contrary information from their opponents during exchanges of arguments. In all cases, the predominance of each stable state depends on the relation between the number of agents and the number of available arguments in the discussion. Overall, this paper describes the dynamics and shows the conditions wherein deliberative agents are expected to construct polarized societies.

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The group polarization phenomenon is a widespread human bias with no apparent geographical or cultural boundaries [1]. Although the conditions that breed extremism have been extensively studied [2-5], comparably little research has examined how to depolarize attitudes in people who already embrace extreme beliefs. Previous studies have shown that deliberating groups may shift toward more moderate opinions [6], but why deliberation is sometimes effective although other times it fails at eliciting consensus remains largely unknown. To investigate this, we performed a large-scale behavioral experiment with live crowds from two countries. Participants (N = 3,288 in study 1 and N = 582 in study 2) were presented with a set of moral scenarios and asked to judge the acceptability of a controversial action. Then they organized in groups of three and discussed their opinions to see whether they agreed on common values of acceptability. We found that groups succeeding at reaching consensus frequently had extreme participants with low confidence and a participant with a moderate view but high confidence. Quantitative analyses showed that these "confident grays" exerted the greatest weight on group judgements and suggest that consensus was driven by a mediation process [7, 8]. Overall, these findings shed light on the elements that allow human groups to resolve moral disagreement.

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Evolutionary psychologists have been interested in male preferences for particular female traits that are thought to signal health and reproductive potential. While the majority of studies have focused on what makes specific body traits attractive-such as the waist-to-hip ratio, the body mass index, and breasts shape and size-there is little empirical research that has examined individual differences in male preferences for specific traits (e.g., favoring breasts over buttocks). The current study begins to fill this empirical gap. In the first experiment (Study 1), 184 male participants were asked to report their preference between breasts and buttocks on a continuous scale. We found that (1) the distribution of preference was bimodal, indicating that Argentinean males tended to define themselves as favoring breasts or buttocks but rarely thinking that these traits contributed equally to their choice and (2) the distribution was biased towards buttocks. In a second experiment (Study 2), 19 male participants were asked to rate pictures of female breasts and buttocks. This study was necessary to generate three categories of pictures with statistically different ratings (high, medium, and low). In a third experiment (Study 3), we recorded eye-movements of 25 male participants while they chose the more attractive between two women, only seeing their breasts and buttock. We found that the first and last fixations were systematically directed towards the self-reported preferred trait.

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When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession, participants often fail to detect a second salient target, a phenomenon referred as the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997). On the basis of a vast corpus of experiments, several cognitive theories suggest that the blink results from a discrete structuring of attention, sampling information from temporal episodes during which several items can access encoding process (Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009; Wyble, Potter, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2011). The objective of this work is to explore the AB when multiple items are presented at the fovea during ocular movements. The authors reasoned that each fixation may cohesively form an episode and hence expected that the blink may vanish within a single fixation. In turn, they expected saccades to accentuate episodic borders and hence shorten the regime of interference when 2 targets are presented fovealy in successive fixations. Evidence is provided in favor of this hypothesis, showing that the blink vanishes when both targets are presented in the core of a single fixation (far from the saccadic boundaries) and that it recovers more rapidly in successive fixations. These studies support current views that episodes should have an effect on the AB and provide evidence that eye movements play an important role in the formation of episodes.

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