ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2024
The roots of polarization in the individual reward system.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Disinformation elicits learning biases.eLife · 2026Article
- A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Limits of the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect in Real and Fake News Credibility Judgments: Two Preregistered Experiments.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- Evolving choice hysteresis in reinforcement learning: Comparing the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Increased complexity of social category markers leads to diverse rule-based categorizations and reduced intergroup bias.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Moderate confirmation bias enhances decision-making in groups of reinforcement-learning agents.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The roots of polarization in the individual reward system.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- How social reinforcement learning can lead to metastable polarisation and the voter model.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Polarization raises concerns for democracy and society, which have expanded in the internet era where (mis)information has become ubiquitous, its transmission faster than ever, and the freedom and means of opinion expressions are expanding. The origin of polarization however remains unclear, with multiple social and emotional factors and individual reasoning biases likely to explain its current forms. In the present work, we adopt a principled approach and show that polarization tendencies can take root in biased reward processing of new information in favour of choice confirmatory evidence. Through agent-based simulations, we show that confirmation bias in individual learning is an independent mechanism and could be sufficient for creating polarization at group level independently of any additional assumptions about the opinions themselves,
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.