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In a recent article published in 精品SM在线影片 Today, our very own Dr. Zachary Kilpatrick鈥檚 work on decision making was highlighted in the context of electoral decision making. In the article, Dr. Kilpatrick鈥檚 ongoing research project on , such as voting, is discussed to understand the way that people make decisions on which candidate to vote for, and why a person may choose one candidate over another.听听

The critical part of this project is the real world application of the topic. Dr. Kilpatrick discusses how people use their friends鈥� opinions in their own decisions, and how those decisions may be biased. 鈥淵ou see friends that you trust are voting for this particular candidate in the primary, that may sway your belief in that direction 鈥� these biases really affect how opinions spread on networks. Such opinion propagation networks can be hijacked to rapidly spread disinformation.鈥� Understanding how disinformation spreads is critical to addressing a number of current problems in the media and social networks. Dr. Kilpatrick emphasized the importance of having a 鈥済ood quantitative understanding of how bias can shape group opinion spread in networks,鈥� which is what Dr. Kilpatrick is working on doing.听

When asked why he chose this type of research and what excited him about it, Dr. Kilpatrick explained that he wanted to extend his projects related to dynamic environments to include other dynamic environments where 鈥測ou鈥檙e making observations of some ground truth and also the opinions of your neighbors 鈥� we wanted to start incorporating these sort of more realistic, real-world examples of how people, or other animals, make decisions.鈥� From here, however, the 鈥渃urrent direction in the work is making models of cliques, basically of large groups of individuals that are all fully connected to each other ... what happens when one of them makes a choice, typically, is that because everybody鈥檚 connected to everybody else and they all see this one person make a decision, then that can abruptly sway the beliefs of a substantial fraction of the group enough for them to trigger an opinion in all of them ... You get these waves of decisions that are triggered by just a single decision of one of the agents in the group.鈥�

We asked Dr. Kilpatrick about what a person should take away from his work. He responded by saying that 鈥渨hen you鈥檙e considering how much to value your friends鈥� or experts鈥� or news sources鈥� opinions, look at their history of decisions that they鈥檝e made and usually that鈥檚 a good guide to what their preexisting biases may already be 鈥� Briefly, just consider peoples鈥� biases when you weigh their opinions in making your own decisions.鈥�