Related papers: Social consensus through the influence of committe…
The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multi-agent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness.…
People are often divided into conformists and contrarians, the former tending to align to the majority opinion in their neighborhood and the latter tending to disagree with that majority. In practice, however, the contrarian tendency is…
Consider a graph $G$, representing a social network. Assume that initially each node is colored either black or white, which corresponds to a positive or negative opinion regarding a consumer product or a technological innovation. In the…
We study the Galam majority rule dynamics with contrarian behavior and an oscillating external propaganda, in a population of agents that can adopt one of two possible opinions. In an iteration step, a random agent interacts with other…
We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…
We propose a model for diffusion of two opposite opinions. Here, the decision to be taken by each individual is a random variable which depends on the tendency of the population, as well on its own trend characteristic. The influence of the…
The complexity of human behaviour can lead to very unpredictable patterns in social activity and structure. Here we demonstrate the instability of a community network controlled by majority ruling, where an element adopts the most popular…
Social networks often exert social pressure, causing individuals to adapt their expressed opinions to conform to their peers. An agent in such systems can be modeled as having a (true and unchanging) inherent belief while broadcasting a…
We consider the following distributed consensus problem: Each node in a complete communication network of size $n$ initially holds an \emph{opinion}, which is chosen arbitrarily from a finite set $\Sigma$. The system must converge toward a…
We study numerically the dynamics of opinion formation under the influence of mass media using the $q$-voter model on a Barabasi-Albert network. We investigate the scenario where a voter adopts the mass media's opinion with a probability…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
Consider $n=\ell+m$ individuals, where $\ell\le m$, with $\ell$ individuals holding an opinion $A$ and $m$ holding an opinion $B$. Suppose that the individuals communicate via an undirected network $G$, and in each time step, each…
The dynamics of spreading of the minority opinion in public debates (a reform proposal, a behavior change, a military retaliation) is studied using a diffusion reaction model. People move by discrete step on a landscape of random geometry…
Mechanistic and tractable mathematical models play a key role in understanding how social influence shapes public opinions. Recently, a weighted-median mechanism has been proposed as a new micro-foundation of opinion dynamics and validated…
We study the evolution of opinions on a directed network with community structure. Individuals update their opinions synchronously based on a weighted average of their neighbors' opinions, their own previous opinions, and external media…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to its plurality-vote counterpart and analyze the time scale to consensus when voters are given more than two options. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population…
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a "dissenting" opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people,…