Social Influence of Competing Groups and Leaders in Opinion Dynamics
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Social Influence of Competing Groups and Leaders in Opinion Dynamics Catherine A. Glass1 · David H. Glass2 Accepted: 11 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper explores the influence of two competing stubborn agent groups on the opinion dynamics of normal agents. Computer simulations are used to investigate the parameter space systematically in order to determine the impact of group size and extremeness on the dynamics and identify optimal strategies for maximizing numbers of followers and social influence. Results show that (a) there are many cases where a group that is neither too large nor too small and neither too extreme nor too central achieves the best outcome, (b) stubborn groups can have a moderating, rather than polarizing, effect on the society in a range of circumstances, and (c) small changes in parameters can lead to transitions from a state where one stubborn group attracts all the normal agents to a state where the other group does so. We also explore how these findings can be interpreted in terms of opinion leaders, truth, and campaigns. Keywords Stubborn agents · Competing groups · Hegselmann–Krause model · Opinion dynamics · Opinion leader
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1061 4-020-10049-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * David H. Glass [email protected] Catherine A. Glass [email protected] 1
Economics Research Branch, Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, 18a Newforge Lane, Belfast BT9 5PX, UK
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School of Computing, Ulster University, Shore Road, Newtownabbey, County Antrim BT37 0QB, UK
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C. A. Glass, D. H. Glass
1 Introduction Opinions and beliefs are important as they impact our behaviour and choices, and are acquired to a great extent through social interaction. Opinion dynamics is a field of study that explores how a host of pertinent factors effect changes in opinions or beliefs. The first mathematical models of opinion dynamics can be traced back to French (1956), Harary (1959) and DeGroot (1974). French’s theory of social power explored the impact of interpersonal interactions on opinion formation and Harary extended this work to further explore conditions leading to unanimity. DeGroot described a model in which the opinions of an agent (individual) are updated by taking an average of an agent’s opinion and those in his group (now called the DeGroot model). Since then, opinion dynamics has attracted growing attention from researchers across a number of disciplines. In economics, opinion dynamics is explored in the context of social learning, which has been the subject of much investigation in the literature (Banerjee 1992; Bikhchandani et al. 1992; Smith and Sørensen 2000; Acemoglu and Ozdaglar 2011; Jadbabaie et al. 2012; Mobius and Rosenblat 2014; Molavi et al. 2018). Social learning has been described as “the social aspect of belief and opinion formation” (Acemoglu and Ozdaglar 2011) and as such is highly r
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