English

Models of Opinion Formation: Influence of Opinion Leaders

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems 2009-11-13 v1

Abstract

This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each individual, located at a vertex of a directed graph, is characterized by her name, the list of people she is interacting with, her level of awareness, and her opinion. Various temporal evolutions according to different local rules are compared in order to find under which conditions the formation of strongly polarized subgroups, each adopting the opinion of one of the two groups of opinion leaders, is favored.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0704.1790,
  title  = {Models of Opinion Formation: Influence of Opinion Leaders},
  author = {Nino Boccara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0704.1790},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

20 pages, 9 figures