English

Consensus formation times in fully connected societies

Physics and Society 2017-06-28 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

Abstract

We developed a statistical mechanics approach to the problem of opinion formation in interacting agents, constrained by a set of social rules, BB. To provide the agents with an adaptive quality, we represented both the social agents and the social rule by perceptrons. For fully connected societies we find that if the agents' interaction is weak, all agents adapt to the social rule BB, with which they form a consensus; but if the interaction is sufficiently strong a consensus is built against the established statusstatus quoquo. This behavior is observed for all temperatures TT and for all values of the agents' interaction parameter H0H_{0}, except in the limit TT\to\infty or when the interaction reaches the critical value H0=1,H_{0}=1, where no consensus is formed. The agents follow a path where, after a time αc,\alpha_{c}, they disregard their peers' opinions on socially neutral issues and reach a full consensus at time αd>αc.\alpha_{d}>\alpha_{c}. The measure of time α\alpha is proportional to the volume of information provided to the agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.06588,
  title  = {Consensus formation times in fully connected societies},
  author = {Juan Pablo Neirotti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.06588},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

9 pages, four figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:29:18.871Z