Related papers: Social Structure and Opinion Formation

We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…

Unlike many complex networks studied in the literature, social networks rarely exhibit unanimous behavior, or consensus. This requires a development of mathematical models that are sufficiently simple to be examined and capture, at the same…

Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…

Opinion formation has been gaining increasing research interests recently, and various models have been proposed. These models, however, have their limitations, among which noticeably include (i) it is generally assumed that adjacent nodes…

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,…

The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…

Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…

We propose the PageRank model of opinion formation and investigate its rich properties on real directed networks of Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, LiveJournal and Twitter. In this model the opinion formation of linked electors is…

We introduce and discuss kinetic models of opinion formation on social networks in which the distribution function depends on both the opinion and the connectivity of the agents. The opinion formation model is subsequently coupled with a…

Human social behavior is organized in stratified, hierarchical networks, with a support group with about 5 members, expanding proportionally at each layer up to a maximum of approximately 150 frequent interactions per individual. This is…

Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…

Traditional models of opinion dynamics, in which the nodes of a network change their opinions based on their interactions with neighboring nodes, consider how opinions evolve either on time-independent networks or on temporal networks with…

We propose and analyze a mathematical model for the evolution of opinions on directed complex networks. Our model generalizes the popular DeGroot and Friedkin-Johnsen models by allowing vertices to have attributes that may influence the…

Much recent research on social networks has focused on the modeling and analysis of how opinions evolve as a function of interpersonal relationships. It is also of great interest to model and understand the implications of friendly and…

Taking a pragmatic approach to the processes involved in the phenomena of collective opinion formation, we investigate two specific modifications to the co-evolving network voter model of opinion formation, studied by Holme and Newman [1].…

Opinion formation in complex social networks may exhibit complex system dynamics even when based on some simplest system evolution models. An interesting and important issue is the effects of the initial state on the final steady-state…

In this paper, we present an empirical study of the opinion dynamics of a large-scale sample of online social network users. We estimate opinions of users as continuous scalars based on their subscriptions to information sources and analyze…

We here discuss the process of opinion formation in an open community where agents are made to interact and consequently update their beliefs. New actors (birth) are assumed to replace individuals that abandon the community (deaths). This…

Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…

We here propose a model to simulate the process of opinion formation, which accounts for the mutual affinity between interacting agents. Opinion and affinity evolve self-consistently, manifesting a highly non trivial interplay. A continuous…