Opinion Formation by Informed Agents

Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have gained lots of attention in the last decade due to its application in social and political science. Control of the diffusion process usually takes place using the most influential people in the society, called opinion leaders or key players. But the opinion leaders can hardly be accessed or hired for spreading the desired opinion or information. This is where informed agents can play a key role. Informed agents are common people, not distinguishable from the other members of the society that act in coordination. In this paper we show that informed agents are able to gradually shift the public opinion toward a desired goal through microscopic interactions. In order to do so they pretend to have an opinion similar to others, but while interacting with them, gradually and intentionally change their opinion toward the desired direction. In this paper a computational model for opinion formation by the informed agents based on the bounded confidence model is proposed. The effects of different parameter settings including population size of the informed agents, their characteristics, and network structure, are investigated. The results show that social and open-minded informed agents are more efficient than selfish or closed-minded agents in control of the public opinion.Social Networks, Informed Agents, Innovation Diffusion, Bounded Confidence, Opinion Dynamics, Opinion Formation

Multi-Level Opinion Dynamics under Bounded Confidence

Opinion dynamics focuses on the opinion evolution in a social community. Recently, some models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence were proposed by Deffuant and Krause, et al. In the literature, agents were generally assumed to have a homogeneous confidence level. This paper proposes an extended model for a group of agents with heterogeneous confidence levels. First, a social differentiation theory is introduced and a social group is divided into opinion subgroups with distinct confidence levels. Second, a multi-level heterogeneous opinion formation model is formulated under the framework of bounded confidence. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to study the collective opinion evolution, focusing on three key factors: the fractions of heterogeneous agents, the initial opinions, and the group size. The simulation results demonstrate that the number of final opinions depends on the fraction of closeminded agents when the group size and the initial opinions are fixed; the final opinions converge more easily when the initial opinions are closer; and the number of final opinions can be approximately modeled by a linear increasing function of the group size and the increasing rate is the fraction of close-minded agents

Self-organization and social science

Abstract Complexity science and its methodological applications have increased in popularity in social science during the last two decades. One key concept within complexity science is that of self-organization. Self-organization is used to refer to the emergence of stable patterns through autonomous and self-reinforcing dynamics at the micro-level. In spite of its potential relevance for the study of social dynamics, the articulation and use of the concept of self-organization has been kept within the boundaries of complexity science and links to and from mainstream social science are scarce. These links can be difficult to establish, even for researchers working in social complexity with a background in social science, because of the theoretical and conceptual diversity and fragmentation in traditional social science. This article is meant to serve as a first step in the process of overcoming this lack of cross-fertilization between complexity and mainstream social science. A systematic review of the concept of self-organization and a critical discussion of similar notions in mainstream social science is presented, in an effort to help practitioners within subareas of complexity science to identify literature from traditional social science that could potentially inform their research

Dynamics of Uncertain Opinion Formation: An Agent-Based Simulation

Abstract: Opinion formation describes the dynamics of opinions in a group of interaction agents and is a powerful tool for predicting the evolution and di usion of the opinions. The existing opinion formation studies assume that the agents express their opinions by using the exact number, i.e., the exact opinions. However, when people express their opinions, sentiments, and support emotions regarding di erent issues, such as politics, products, and events, they o en cannot provide the exact opinions but express uncertain opinions. Furthermore, due to the di erences in culture backgrounds and characters of agents, people who encounter uncertain opinions o en show di erent uncertainty tolerances. The goal of this study is to investigate the dynamics of uncertain opinion formation in the framework of bounded confidence. By taking di erent uncertain opinions and di erent uncertainty tolerances into account, we use an agent-based simulation to investigate the influences of uncertain opinions in opinion formation from two aspects: the ratios of the agents that express uncertain opinions and the widths of the uncertain opinions, and also provide the explanations of the observations obtained

Micro-macro dynamics of the online opinion evolution: an asynchronous network model approach

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper investigates the complex relationship between endogenous and exogenous, deterministic and stochastic stimulating factors in public opinion dynamics. An asynchronous multi-agent network model is proposed to explore the interaction mechanism between individual opinions and the public opinion in online multi-agent network community, including both the micro and the macro patterns of opinion evolution. In addition, based on random network models, a novel algorithm is provided for opinion evolution prediction. The model property analysis and numerical experiments show that the proposed asynchronous multi-agent network model can assimilate and explain some interesting phenomena that are observed in the real world. Further case studies with numerical simulation and real-world applications confirm the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed model in public opinion analysis. The results challenge the common perception that mass media or opinion facilitators play the fundamental role in controlling the development trends of public opinion. This study shows that the formation and evolution of public opinion in the presence of opinion leaders depend also on an individual’s emotional inertia and conformity pressures from peers in the same topic group

Agent-Based Models for Opinion Formation: A Bibliographic Survey

Agent-based models are now largely adopted to describe how opinions emerge in a group of people. This survey provides an analysis of the literature on the subject, highlighting the major characteristics of such models. Over the last decade, the number of papers has grown at an overall annual rate of 16%, though not continually. Two communities contribute to the research effort: physics and control systems. However, their mutual awareness and collaboration are rather low. The prevailing mechanism adopted to describe the interaction among the agents is bilateral, but not symmetric. In most cases, the opinion is described by a continuous variable. Just a few papers consider a utility function for the agents

Consensus Reaching in Social Network Group Decision Making: Research Paradigms and Challenges

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.In social network group decision making (SNGDM), the consensus reaching process (CRP) is used to help decision makers with social relationships reach consensus. Many CRP studies have been conducted in SNGDM until now. This paper provides a review of CRPs in SNGDM, and as a result it classifies them into two paradigms: (i) the CRP paradigm based on trust relationships, and (ii) the CRP paradigm based on opinion evolution. Furthermore, identified research challenges are put forward to advance this area of research

Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Coordination

In everyday life, people often depend on their theory of mind, i.e., their ability to reason about unobservable mental content of others to understand, explain, and predict their behaviour. Many agent-based models have been designed to develop computational theory of mind and analyze its effectiveness in various tasks and settings. However, most existing models are not generic (e.g., only applied in a given setting), not feasible (e.g., require too much information to be processed), or not human-inspired (e.g., do not capture the behavioral heuristics of humans). This hinders their applicability in many settings. Accordingly, we propose a new computational theory of mind, which captures the human decision heuristics of reasoning by abstracting individual beliefs about others. We specifically study computational affinity and show how it can be used in tandem with theory of mind reasoning when designing agent models for human-agent negotiation. We perform two-agent simulations to analyze the role of affinity in getting to agreements when there is a bound on the time to be spent for negotiating. Our results suggest that modeling affinity can ease the negotiation process by decreasing the number of rounds needed for an agreement as well as yield a higher benefit for agents with theory of mind reasoning.</p