Competing Effects of Social Balance and Influence
Abstract
We study a three-state (leftist, rightist, centrist) model that couples the dynamics of social balance with an external deradicalizing field. The mean-field analysis shows that there exists a critical value of the external field such that for a weak external field (), the system exhibits a metastable fixed point and a saddle point in addition to a stable fixed point. However, if the strength of the external field is sufficiently large (), there is only one (stable) fixed point which corresponds to an all-centrist consensus state (absorbing state). In the weak-field regime, the convergence time to the absorbing state is evaluated using the quasi-stationary distribution and is found to be in agreement with the results obtained by numerical simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.04410,
title = {Competing Effects of Social Balance and Influence},
author = {P. Singh and S. Sreenivasan and B. K. Szymanski and G. Korniss},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.04410},
year = {2016}
}