J Lorenz
Biographic Data
| ID | 106799 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lorenz |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Lorenz |
| SIGNATURE | LORENZ J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Constructor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5547-7848 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
ABoT 2.247, KBo. 57.180 und das Lied der Freilassung
This article discusses two fragments written down during Hittite Empire times that have been attributed to the Hurrian-Hittite bilingual Song of Release (CTH 789) found at the Hittite capital Ḫattuša. The authors argue that ABoT 2.247 is a cadaster text, and that the classification of KBo. 57.180 as part of the Song of Release remains doubtful. Therefore, the transmission of the Hurrian Song of Release is limited to the era preceding the Hittite …
Being heard and being seen: Building connection in the Deafblind community
From cognitive coherence to political polarization: A data‐driven agent‐based model of belief change
Political polarization represents a rising issue in many countries, making it more and more important to understand its relation to cognitive‐motivational and social influence mechanisms. Yet, the link between micro‐level mechanisms and macro‐level phenomena remains unclear. We investigated the consequences of individuals striving for cognitive coherence in their belief systems on political polarization in society in an agent‐based model. In this…
Calibrating an Opinion Dynamics Model to Empirical Opinion Distributions and Transitions
Agent-based models of opinion dynamics enable the investigation of societal phenomena that psychological theories of individual opinion change trigger in artificial societies. Many of such models are validated on the phenomenological level only (e.g., can they produce polarization) and not with respect to opinion data about real-world attitude distributions known from social surveys or individual attitude change observed in panel surveys. In this…
On the Quantification of Crowd Wisdom, Optimal Crowd Size, and the Mean-Median Dilemma
Crowd wisdom is a fascinating metaphor in the realm of collective intelligence. However, even for the simple case of estimation tasks of one continuous value, the quantification of the phenomenon lacks some conceptual clarity. Two interrelated questions of quantification are at stake. First, how we can quantify the degree of crowd wisdom in a sample and how it can be distinguished from the individual wisdom of its members? Two measures will be pr…
Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of attitude change theories. Various psychological theories of persuasive communication at the individual level are implemented as simulation experiments. The model allows us to investigate the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. Simulations show that different theories produce differen…
Efficiency loss and support for income redistribution: Evidence from a laboratory experiment
Income redistribution with an efficiency loss is expected to have a twofold negative effect on support for redistribution, as it lowers egoistic support for redistribution and activates efficiency preferences. This study tests whether such a negative relationship exists, increases with the size of efficiency loss and interacts with group communication and the income position. We present a laboratory experiment in which subjects receive a randomly…
Advancing Conflict Research Through Computational Approaches
Conflict, from small-scale verbal disputes to large-scale violent war between nations, is one of the most fundamental elements of social life and a central topic in social science research. The main argument of this book is that computational approaches have enormous potential to advance conflict research, e.g., by making use of the ever-growing computer processing power to model complex conflict dynamics, by drawing on innovative methods from si…
Computational Conflict Research
This open access book presents a set of original studies by research—by an international team of scholars from a range of fields—that use cutting-edge computational methods to research conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence.
On the Fate of Protests: Dynamics of Social Activation and Topic Selection Online and in the Streets
This chapter studies individual and network conditions for the emergence of large social protests in an agent-based model. We use two recent examples from Iran and Germany to inform the modeling process. In our agent-based model, people, who are interconnected in networks, interact and exchange their concerns on a finite number of topics. They may start to protest either because of their concern or because the fraction of protesters in their soci…
Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of theories of attitude change in psychological theory. For experimenting with theories, various psychological theories of persuasive communication are implemented. The model allows for investigating the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. The simulations show that different theories pr…
Modeling the Evolution of Ideological Landscapes through Opinion Dynamics
This paper explores the possibilities to explain the stylized facts of empirically observed ideological landscapes through the bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics. Empirically, left-right self-placements are often not normally distributed but have multiple peaks (e.g. extreme-left-center-right-extreme). Some stylized facts are extracted from histograms from the European Social Survey. In the bounded confidence model, agents repeatedly ad…
An analysis of the link between individual identity traits and radical party choice
While recent trends in the study of radical party voting have tended to focus on egalitarian attitudes and individual personality traits in their endeavour to explain radical party choice, the present study pits individual identity traits in the spotlight of ballot box behaviour, using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. We analyse the link between exclusive and inclusive identity (identifying with a more restricted 'in-…
The triple‐filter bubble: Using agent‐based modelling to test a meta‐theoretical framework for the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have both been linked recently by commentators to rapid societal changes such as Brexit and the polarization of the US American society in the course of Donald Trump's election campaign. We hypothesize that information filtering processes take place on the individual, the social, and the technological levels (triple-filter-bubble framework). We constructed an agent-based modelling (ABM) and analysed twelve differe…
Social Cohesion and Its Correlates: A Comparison of Western and Asian Societies
Trust can either be conceived of as a social glue in its own right, or as a constitutive element of a larger societal syndrome, termed social cohesion. This contribution takes the latter perspective, analyzing social trust and trust in institutions as integral parts of social cohesion more generally. Despite ongoing worries about the state of social cohesion in contemporary societies, surprisingly little is known as to which macro-level condition…
Just Don’t Call it a Tax! Framing in an Experiment on Voting and Redistribution
Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deli…
Models of Social Influence: Towards the Next Frontiers
In , Robert Axelrod wondered in a highly influential paper "If people tend to become more alike in their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior when they interact, why do not all such di erences eventually disappear?"Axelrod's question highlighted an ongoing quest for formal theoretical answers joined by researchers from a wide range of disciplines.Numerous models have been developed to understand why and under what conditions diversity in beliefs, att…
Rank-Optimal Weighting or “How to be Best in the OECD Better Life Index
Robust Clustering in Generalized Bounded Confidence Models
Bounded confidence models add a critical theoretical ingredient to the explanation of opinion clustering, opinion polarisation, and the persistence of opinion diversity, assuming that individuals are only influenced by others who are su iciently similar and neglect actors with too di erent views. However, despite its enormous recognition in the literature, the bounded confidence assumption has been criticized for being able to explain diversity o…
Majoritarian democracy undermines truth-finding in deliberative committees
The aggregated judgments of many usually outperform individual estimates of vaguely known facts. Communication among individuals may, however, undermine this wisdom-of-crowd effect because it makes judgments mutually dependent. Deliberative democratic theory, on the other hand, suggests that communication promotes correct decisions. We investigate this puzzle about the positive and negative consequences of consensus formation on the wisdom of cro…
Von der gelehrten Schreibung zum anerkannten Standard
Von der gelehrten Schreibung zum anerkannten Standard
Noninvasive Saliva Collection for DNA Analyses From Free‐Ranging T ibetan M acaques ( M acaca thibetana )
Cryptic and endangered fauna, including many primate taxa, pose challenges for noninvasive collection of biomaterials. As a result, application of noninvasive genotyping to primates has been limited to the use of samples such as feces and hair for the extraction of PCR ‐amplifiable DNA . We present a method for noninvasive collection of saliva from habituated, free‐ranging monkeys. The method utilizes a low‐cost apparatus that controls for contam…
The Faulty Metaphors of Finance in: Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas
Este artigo apresenta uma análise do conceito de “dívida” em Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas de Machado de Assis. O narrador, representante da elite brasileira do século XIX, imagina “dívida” sempre como dívida econômica que pode ser cumprida e então resolvida (ou melhor, desaparecida). Ele relata qualquer tipo de experiência humana com um vocabulário financeiro, se referindo a dívida como metáfora, mas essas metáforas são ao mesmo tempo brilhant…
Understanding Early Bronze Age social structure through mortuary remains: A pilot aDNA study from Titriş Höyük, southeastern Turkey
This report describes a pilot study examining aDNA from a skeletal population excavated in the 1990s at the late Early Bronze Age (EBA, c. 2300-2100 BC) urban settlement of Titriş Höyük in southeastern Turkey. Typically, late EBA burials at Titriş Höyük consisted of periodically reused underground family crypts contained within houses. However, one unique set of remains dated to the latest phase of the late EBA occupation at the site departed fro…
Models of Social Influence: Towards the Next Frontiers
In , Robert Axelrod wondered in a highly influential paper "If people tend to become more alike in their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior when they interact, why do not all such di erences eventually disappear?"Axelrod's question highlighted an ongoing quest for formal theoretical answers joined by researchers from a wide range of disciplines.Numerous models have been developed to understand why and under what conditions diversity in beliefs, att…
The triple‐filter bubble: Using agent‐based modelling to test a meta‐theoretical framework for the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have both been linked recently by commentators to rapid societal changes such as Brexit and the polarization of the US American society in the course of Donald Trump's election campaign. We hypothesize that information filtering processes take place on the individual, the social, and the technological levels (triple-filter-bubble framework). We constructed an agent-based modelling (ABM) and analysed twelve differe…
Social Cohesion and Its Correlates: A Comparison of Western and Asian Societies
Trust can either be conceived of as a social glue in its own right, or as a constitutive element of a larger societal syndrome, termed social cohesion. This contribution takes the latter perspective, analyzing social trust and trust in institutions as integral parts of social cohesion more generally. Despite ongoing worries about the state of social cohesion in contemporary societies, surprisingly little is known as to which macro-level condition…
Rank-Optimal Weighting or “How to be Best in the OECD Better Life Index
Robust Clustering in Generalized Bounded Confidence Models
Bounded confidence models add a critical theoretical ingredient to the explanation of opinion clustering, opinion polarisation, and the persistence of opinion diversity, assuming that individuals are only influenced by others who are su iciently similar and neglect actors with too di erent views. However, despite its enormous recognition in the literature, the bounded confidence assumption has been criticized for being able to explain diversity o…
Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of attitude change theories. Various psychological theories of persuasive communication at the individual level are implemented as simulation experiments. The model allows us to investigate the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. Simulations show that different theories produce differen…
Understanding Early Bronze Age social structure through mortuary remains: A pilot aDNA study from Titriş Höyük, southeastern Turkey
This report describes a pilot study examining aDNA from a skeletal population excavated in the 1990s at the late Early Bronze Age (EBA, c. 2300-2100 BC) urban settlement of Titriş Höyük in southeastern Turkey. Typically, late EBA burials at Titriş Höyük consisted of periodically reused underground family crypts contained within houses. However, one unique set of remains dated to the latest phase of the late EBA occupation at the site departed fro…
Efficiency loss and support for income redistribution: Evidence from a laboratory experiment
Income redistribution with an efficiency loss is expected to have a twofold negative effect on support for redistribution, as it lowers egoistic support for redistribution and activates efficiency preferences. This study tests whether such a negative relationship exists, increases with the size of efficiency loss and interacts with group communication and the income position. We present a laboratory experiment in which subjects receive a randomly…
Just Don’t Call it a Tax! Framing in an Experiment on Voting and Redistribution
Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deli…
Majoritarian democracy undermines truth-finding in deliberative committees
The aggregated judgments of many usually outperform individual estimates of vaguely known facts. Communication among individuals may, however, undermine this wisdom-of-crowd effect because it makes judgments mutually dependent. Deliberative democratic theory, on the other hand, suggests that communication promotes correct decisions. We investigate this puzzle about the positive and negative consequences of consensus formation on the wisdom of cro…
Program and Conference Schedule
Zur Bedeutung und Etymologie von hethitisch ūn
Noninvasive Saliva Collection for DNA Analyses From Free‐Ranging T ibetan M acaques ( M acaca thibetana )
Cryptic and endangered fauna, including many primate taxa, pose challenges for noninvasive collection of biomaterials. As a result, application of noninvasive genotyping to primates has been limited to the use of samples such as feces and hair for the extraction of PCR ‐amplifiable DNA . We present a method for noninvasive collection of saliva from habituated, free‐ranging monkeys. The method utilizes a low‐cost apparatus that controls for contam…
The Faulty Metaphors of Finance in: Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas
Este artigo apresenta uma análise do conceito de “dívida” em Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas de Machado de Assis. O narrador, representante da elite brasileira do século XIX, imagina “dívida” sempre como dívida econômica que pode ser cumprida e então resolvida (ou melhor, desaparecida). Ele relata qualquer tipo de experiência humana com um vocabulário financeiro, se referindo a dívida como metáfora, mas essas metáforas são ao mesmo tempo brilhant…
Understanding Early Bronze Age social structure through mortuary remains: A pilot aDNA study from Titriş Höyük, southeastern Turkey
This report describes a pilot study examining aDNA from a skeletal population excavated in the 1990s at the late Early Bronze Age (EBA, c. 2300-2100 BC) urban settlement of Titriş Höyük in southeastern Turkey. Typically, late EBA burials at Titriş Höyük consisted of periodically reused underground family crypts contained within houses. However, one unique set of remains dated to the latest phase of the late EBA occupation at the site departed fro…
Von der gelehrten Schreibung zum anerkannten Standard
Von der gelehrten Schreibung zum anerkannten Standard
Majoritarian democracy undermines truth-finding in deliberative committees
The aggregated judgments of many usually outperform individual estimates of vaguely known facts. Communication among individuals may, however, undermine this wisdom-of-crowd effect because it makes judgments mutually dependent. Deliberative democratic theory, on the other hand, suggests that communication promotes correct decisions. We investigate this puzzle about the positive and negative consequences of consensus formation on the wisdom of cro…
Rank-Optimal Weighting or “How to be Best in the OECD Better Life Index
Robust Clustering in Generalized Bounded Confidence Models
Bounded confidence models add a critical theoretical ingredient to the explanation of opinion clustering, opinion polarisation, and the persistence of opinion diversity, assuming that individuals are only influenced by others who are su iciently similar and neglect actors with too di erent views. However, despite its enormous recognition in the literature, the bounded confidence assumption has been criticized for being able to explain diversity o…
Just Don’t Call it a Tax! Framing in an Experiment on Voting and Redistribution
Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deli…
Models of Social Influence: Towards the Next Frontiers
In , Robert Axelrod wondered in a highly influential paper "If people tend to become more alike in their beliefs, attitudes, and behavior when they interact, why do not all such di erences eventually disappear?"Axelrod's question highlighted an ongoing quest for formal theoretical answers joined by researchers from a wide range of disciplines.Numerous models have been developed to understand why and under what conditions diversity in beliefs, att…
The triple‐filter bubble: Using agent‐based modelling to test a meta‐theoretical framework for the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have both been linked recently by commentators to rapid societal changes such as Brexit and the polarization of the US American society in the course of Donald Trump's election campaign. We hypothesize that information filtering processes take place on the individual, the social, and the technological levels (triple-filter-bubble framework). We constructed an agent-based modelling (ABM) and analysed twelve differe…
Social Cohesion and Its Correlates: A Comparison of Western and Asian Societies
Trust can either be conceived of as a social glue in its own right, or as a constitutive element of a larger societal syndrome, termed social cohesion. This contribution takes the latter perspective, analyzing social trust and trust in institutions as integral parts of social cohesion more generally. Despite ongoing worries about the state of social cohesion in contemporary societies, surprisingly little is known as to which macro-level condition…
Advancing Conflict Research Through Computational Approaches
Conflict, from small-scale verbal disputes to large-scale violent war between nations, is one of the most fundamental elements of social life and a central topic in social science research. The main argument of this book is that computational approaches have enormous potential to advance conflict research, e.g., by making use of the ever-growing computer processing power to model complex conflict dynamics, by drawing on innovative methods from si…
Computational Conflict Research
This open access book presents a set of original studies by research—by an international team of scholars from a range of fields—that use cutting-edge computational methods to research conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence.
On the Fate of Protests: Dynamics of Social Activation and Topic Selection Online and in the Streets
This chapter studies individual and network conditions for the emergence of large social protests in an agent-based model. We use two recent examples from Iran and Germany to inform the modeling process. In our agent-based model, people, who are interconnected in networks, interact and exchange their concerns on a finite number of topics. They may start to protest either because of their concern or because the fraction of protesters in their soci…
Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of theories of attitude change in psychological theory. For experimenting with theories, various psychological theories of persuasive communication are implemented. The model allows for investigating the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. The simulations show that different theories pr…
Modeling the Evolution of Ideological Landscapes through Opinion Dynamics
This paper explores the possibilities to explain the stylized facts of empirically observed ideological landscapes through the bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics. Empirically, left-right self-placements are often not normally distributed but have multiple peaks (e.g. extreme-left-center-right-extreme). Some stylized facts are extracted from histograms from the European Social Survey. In the bounded confidence model, agents repeatedly ad…
An analysis of the link between individual identity traits and radical party choice
While recent trends in the study of radical party voting have tended to focus on egalitarian attitudes and individual personality traits in their endeavour to explain radical party choice, the present study pits individual identity traits in the spotlight of ballot box behaviour, using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. We analyse the link between exclusive and inclusive identity (identifying with a more restricted 'in-…
On the Quantification of Crowd Wisdom, Optimal Crowd Size, and the Mean-Median Dilemma
Crowd wisdom is a fascinating metaphor in the realm of collective intelligence. However, even for the simple case of estimation tasks of one continuous value, the quantification of the phenomenon lacks some conceptual clarity. Two interrelated questions of quantification are at stake. First, how we can quantify the degree of crowd wisdom in a sample and how it can be distinguished from the individual wisdom of its members? Two measures will be pr…
Individual attitude change and societal dynamics: Computational experiments with psychological theories
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of attitude change theories. Various psychological theories of persuasive communication at the individual level are implemented as simulation experiments. The model allows us to investigate the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. Simulations show that different theories produce differen…
Efficiency loss and support for income redistribution: Evidence from a laboratory experiment
Income redistribution with an efficiency loss is expected to have a twofold negative effect on support for redistribution, as it lowers egoistic support for redistribution and activates efficiency preferences. This study tests whether such a negative relationship exists, increases with the size of efficiency loss and interacts with group communication and the income position. We present a laboratory experiment in which subjects receive a randomly…
Calibrating an Opinion Dynamics Model to Empirical Opinion Distributions and Transitions
Agent-based models of opinion dynamics enable the investigation of societal phenomena that psychological theories of individual opinion change trigger in artificial societies. Many of such models are validated on the phenomenological level only (e.g., can they produce polarization) and not with respect to opinion data about real-world attitude distributions known from social surveys or individual attitude change observed in panel surveys. In this…
ABoT 2.247, KBo. 57.180 und das Lied der Freilassung
This article discusses two fragments written down during Hittite Empire times that have been attributed to the Hurrian-Hittite bilingual Song of Release (CTH 789) found at the Hittite capital Ḫattuša. The authors argue that ABoT 2.247 is a cadaster text, and that the classification of KBo. 57.180 as part of the Song of Release remains doubtful. Therefore, the transmission of the Hurrian Song of Release is limited to the era preceding the Hittite …
Computer Science (13 works) · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (6 works) · Economics (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works)