194 research outputs found
Sociophysics Simulations II: Opinion Dynamics
Individuals have opinions but can change them under the influence of others.
The recent models of Sznajd (missionaries), of Deffuant et al. (negotiators),
and of Krause and Hegselmann (opportunists) are reviewed here, while the voter
and Ising models, Galam's majority rule and the Axelrod multicultural model
were dealt with by other lecturers at this 8th Granada Seminar.Comment: 18 pages including 9 figs., for 8th Granada seminar (AIP Conf.Proc.
Bounded Confidence under Preferential Flip: A Coupled Dynamics of Structural Balance and Opinions
In this work we study the coupled dynamics of social balance and opinion
formation. We propose a model where agents form opinions under bounded
confidence, but only considering the opinions of their friends. The signs of
social ties -friendships and enmities- evolve seeking for social balance,
taking into account how similar agents' opinions are. We consider both the case
where opinions have one and two dimensions. We find that our dynamics produces
the segregation of agents into two cliques, with the opinions of agents in one
clique differing from those in the other. Depending on the level of bounded
confidence, the dynamics can produce either consensus of opinions within each
clique or the coexistence of several opinion clusters in a clique. For the
uni-dimensional case, the opinions in one clique are all below the opinions in
the other clique, hence defining a "left clique" and a "right clique". In the
two-dimensional case, our numerical results suggest that the two cliques are
separated by a hyperplane in the opinion space. We also show that the
phenomenon of unidimensional opinions identified by DeMarzo, Vayanos and
Zwiebel (Q J Econ 2003) extends partially to our dynamics. Finally, in the
context of politics, we comment about the possible relation of our results to
the fragmentation of an ideology and the emergence of new political parties.Comment: 8 figures, PLoS ONE 11(10): e0164323, 201
Modelling Opinion Formation with Physics Tools: Call for Closer Link with Reality
The growing field of studies of opinion formation using physical formalisms and computer simulation based tools suffers from relative lack of connection to the 'real world' societal behaviour. Such sociophysics research should aim at explaining observations or at proposing new ones. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, as many works concentrate more on the models themselves than on the social phenomena. Moreover, the simplifications proposed in simulations often sacrifice realism on the altar of computability. There are several ways to improve the value of the research, the most important by promoting truly multidisciplinary cooperation between physicists aiming to describe social phenomena and sociologists studying the phenomena in the field. In the specific case of modelling of opinion formation there are a few technical ideas which might bring the computer models much closer to reality, and therefore to improve the predictive value of the sociophysics approach.Methodology, Agent Based Social Simulation, Qualitative Analysis; Evidence; Conditions of Application
Inertial Hegselmann-Krause Systems
We derive an energy bound for inertial Hegselmann-Krause (HK) systems, which
we define as a variant of the classic HK model in which the agents can change
their weights arbitrarily at each step. We use the bound to prove the
convergence of HK systems with closed-minded agents, which settles a conjecture
of long standing. This paper also introduces anchored HK systems and show their
equivalence to the symmetric heterogeneous model
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