Role of social environment and social clustering in spread of opinions in co-evolving networks

Abstract

Taking a pragmatic approach to the processes involved in the phenomena of collective opinion formation, we investigate two specific modifications to the co-evolving network voter model of opinion formation, studied by Holme and Newman [1]. First, we replace the rewiring probability parameter by a distribution of probability of accepting or rejecting opinions between individuals, accounting for the asymmetric influences in relationships among individuals in a social group. Second, we modify the rewiring step by a path-length-based preference for rewiring that reinforces local clustering. We have investigated the influences of these modifications on the outcomes of the simulations of this model. We found that varying the shape of the distribution of probability of accepting or rejecting opinions can lead to the emergence of two qualitatively distinct final states, one having several isolated connected components each in internal consensus leading to the existence of diverse set of opinions and the other having one single dominant connected component with each node within it having the same opinion. Furthermore, and more importantly, we found that the initial clustering in network can also induce similar transitions. Our investigation also brings forward that these transitions are governed by a weak and complex dependence on system size. We found that the networks in the final states of the model have rich structural properties including the small world property for some parameter regimes. [1] P. Holme and M. Newman, Phys. Rev. E 74, 056108 (2006).

References in corpus (7)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Nonequilibrium phase transition in the coevolution of networks and opinions
• Generic Absorbing Transition in Coevolution Dynamics
• Early fragmentation in the adaptive voter model on directed networks
• Dynamics of Confident Voting
• Fragmentation transitions in multi-state voter models

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Opinion dynamics: models, extensions and external effects
• Social Clustering in Epidemic Spread on Coevolving Networks
• Noise in Coevolving Networks
• Transitivity reinforcement in the coevolving voter model
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking of active phase in coevolving nonlinear voter model
• Separating temporal and topological effects in walk-based network centrality