Rise of an alternative majority against opinion leaders

Abstract

We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for cultural interaction among social agents that allows for non-interacting states. We find three collective phases in the space of parameters of the system, given by the fraction of opinion leaders and a quantity representing the number of available states: one ordered phase having the state imposed by the leaders; another nontrivial ordered phase consisting of a majority group in a state orthogonal or alternative to that of the opinion leaders, and a disordered phase, where many small groups coexist. We show that the spontaneous rise of an alternative group in the presence of opinion leaders depends on the existence of a minimum number of long-range connections in the underlying network. This phenomenon challenges the common idea that influentials are fundamental to propagation processes in society, such as the formation of public opinion.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities
• On the Role of Zealotry in the Voter Model
• The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics
• Emergence of influential spreaders in modified rumor models
• Divergent Time Scale in Axelrod Model Dynamics
• Social Influencing and Associated Random Walk Models: Asymptotic Consensus Times on the Complete Graph

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Dynamical Galam model
• The role of zealots in the spread of linguistic traits
• Leaders and obstacles raise cultural boundaries