English

Modelling opinion formation driven communities in social networks

Physics and Society 2012-05-22 v2 Computers and Society Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

In a previous paper we proposed a model to study the dynamics of opinion formation in human societies by a co-evolution process involving two distinct time scales of fast transaction and slower network evolution dynamics. In the transaction dynamics we take into account short range interactions as discussions between individuals and long range interactions to describe the attitude to the overall mood of society. The latter is handled by a uniformly distributed parameter α\alpha, assigned randomly to each individual, as quenched personal bias. The network evolution dynamics is realized by rewiring the societal network due to state variable changes as a result of transaction dynamics. The main consequence of this complex dynamics is that communities emerge in the social network for a range of values in the ratio between time scales. In this paper we focus our attention on the attitude parameter α\alpha and its influence on the conformation of opinion and the size of the resulting communities. We present numerical studies and extract interesting features of the model that can be interpreted in terms of social behaviour.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1007.4177,
  title  = {Modelling opinion formation driven communities in social networks},
  author = {Gerardo Iñiguez and Rafael A. Barrio and János Kertész and Kimmo K. Kaski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.4177},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures. Added references. To appear in Special Issue 2010 of Computer Physics Communications

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