Can Partisan Voting Lead to Truth?

Abstract

We study an extension of the voter model in which each agent is endowed with an innate preference for one of two states that we term as "truth" or "falsehood". Due to interactions with neighbors, an agent that innately prefers truth can be persuaded to adopt a false opinion (and thus be discordant with its innate preference) or the agent can possess an internally concordant "true" opinion. Parallel states exist for agents that inherently prefer falsehood. We determine the conditions under which a population of such agents can ultimately reach a consensus for the truth, a consensus for falsehood, or reach an impasse where an agent tends to adopt the opinion that is in internal concordance with its innate preference so that consensus is never achieved.

8 pages in IOP format, 3 figures; version 2 contains minor changes, for publication in JSTAT

References in corpus (3)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics
• Heterogeneous Voter Models

Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Collective dynamics of belief evolution under cognitive coherence and social conformity
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• Voter models with contrarian agents
• The effect of quenched disorder in neutral theories
• Opinion Formation under Antagonistic Influences
• Polarization and Consensus by Opposing External Sources
• A collective opinion formation model under Bayesian updating and confirmation bias
• Partisan Voter Model: Stochastic description and noise-induced transitions
• Modeling language ideologies for the dynamics of languages in contact
• Time to absorption for a heterogeneous neutral competition model
• Evolution via imitation among like-minded individuals
• Universality of noise-induced transitions in nonlinear voter models
• Breaking coexistence: Zealotry vs. nonlinear social impact
• Voter-like dynamics with conflicting preferences on modular networks
• The evolution of pluralistic ignorance
• Reputation-Driven Voting Dynamics
• Competition between private and expressed opinions in binary choice: the $\alpha$-EPO $q$-voter model