Social consensus and tipping points with opinion inertia

DOI10.1016/J.PHYSA.2015.09.081MaRDI QIDQ1618979zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors R. Smith

Publication date 13 November 2018

Published in Physica A (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1723

zbMATH Keywords

influencingopinion dynamicsopinion inertiasocial networkstipping points

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Small world graphs, complex networks (graph-theoretic aspects) (05C82) Models of societies, social and urban evolution (91D10) Social networks; opinion dynamics (91D30)

Abstract: When opinions, behaviors or ideas diffuse within a population, some are invariably stickier than others. The stickier the opinion, behavior or idea, the greater is an individual's inertia to replace it with an alternative. Here we study the effect of stickiness of opinions in a two-opinion model, where individuals change their opinion only after a certain number of consecutive encounters with the alternative opinion. Assuming that one opinion has a fixed stickiness, we investigate how the critical size of the competing opinion required to tip over the entire population varies as a function of the competing opinion's stickiness. We analyze this scenario for the case of a complete-graph topology through simulations, and through a semi-analytical approach which yields an upper bound for the critical minority size. We present analogous simulation results for the case of the ErdH{o}s-R'enyi random network. Finally, we investigate the coarsening properties of sticky opinion spreading on two-dimensional lattices, and show that the presence of stickiness gives rise to an effective surface tension that causes the coarsening behavior to become curvature-driven.

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Cites work

• A generalized model of social and biological contagion
• A simple model of global cascades on random networks
• Algebraic coarsening in voter models with intermediate states
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1350307 (Why is no real title available?)
• Social influencing and associated random walk models: asymptotic consensus times on the complete graph

Cited in

(3)

• Network resilience
• SLOWER IS FASTER: FOSTERING CONSENSUS FORMATION BY HETEROGENEOUS INERTIA
• On social sensitivity to either zealot or independent minorities

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