The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer

Abstract

The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges 'spontaneously' in absence of centralised institutions and covers topic that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks, and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems.

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• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Sociophysics: A review of Galam models
• Homophily, Cultural Drift and the Co-Evolution of Cultural Groups
• Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems
• Voter Models on Heterogeneous Networks
• Does a Single Zealot Affect an Infinite Group of Voters ?
• The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics
• The Spontaneous Emergence of Conventions: An Experimental Study of Cultural Evolution
• Non-equilibrium dynamics of language games on complex networks
• Analytical Solution of the Voter Model on Disordered Networks
• Non-equilibrium phase transition in negotiation dynamics
• The Naming Game in Social Networks: Community Formation and Consensus Engineering
• Agreement dynamics on small-world networks
• In-depth analysis of the Naming Game dynamics: the homogeneous mixing case

Cited by in corpus (59)

• The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic
• Networks beyond pairwise interactions: structure and dynamics
• Social contagion models on hypergraphs
• Anticipating cryptocurrency prices using machine learning
• Reality Inspired Voter Models: A Mini-Review
• A Gated Recurrent Unit Approach to Bitcoin Price Prediction
• Machine learning dismantling and early-warning signals of disintegration in complex systems
• Emergence of polarized ideological opinions in multidimensional topic spaces
• Multistability, intermittency and hybrid transitions in social contagion models on hypergraphs
• From the origin of life to pandemics: Emergent phenomena in complex systems
• Group interactions modulate critical mass dynamics in social convention
• Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations
• The Dynamics of Norm Change in the Cultural Evolution of Language
• Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events
• Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis
• Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
• Self-induced consensus of Reddit users to characterise the GameStop short squeeze
• The fragility of decentralised trustless socio-technical systems
• Explosive transitions induced by interdependent contagion-consensus dynamics in multiplex networks
• Critical mass effect in evolutionary games triggered by zealots
• Finding Patient Zero: Learning Contagion Source with Graph Neural Networks
• A Laplacian Approach to Stubborn Agents and their Role in Opinion Formation on Influence Networks
• Shaping New Norms for AI
• Divergence and Consensus in Majority Rule
• A Bayesian Approach to the Naming Game Model
• Cross-Issue Solidarity and Truth Convergence in Opinion Dynamics
• Polarization and Consensus by Opposing External Sources
• Emergence of linguistic conventions in multi-agent reinforcement learning
• Compartmental voter model
• General consensus with circular opinion under attractive and repulsive mechanisms
• Inferring Spatial Source of Disease Outbreaks using Maximum Entropy
• Analytical formulation for multidimensional continuous opinion models
• Curvature-driven growth and interfacial noise in the voter model with self-induced zealots
• Supportive interactions in the noisy voter model
• Periodic Coupling inhibits Second-order Consensus on Networks
• Opinion dynamics on tie-decay networks
• Finite-size effects on the convergence time in continuous-opinion dynamics
• Understanding the nature of the long-range memory phenomenon in socioeconomic systems
• Effects of homophily and heterophily on preferred-degree networks: mean-field analysis and overwhelming transition
• The politics of physicists social models
• Opinion dynamics with emergent collective memory: the impact of a long and heterogeneous news history
• Reinforcement Communication Learning in Different Social Network Structures
• Opinion inertia and coarsening in the Persistent Voter model
• Modeling language ideologies for the dynamics of languages in contact
• Virtual walks and phase transitions in two dimensional BChS model with extreme switches
• Collective patterns and stable misunderstandings in networks striving for consensus without a common value system
• Consensus formation and relative stimulus perception in quality-sensitive, interdependent agent systems
• The Role of bilinguals in the Bayesian naming game
• A branching random-walk model of disease outbreaks and the percolation backbone
• On the dual nature of adoption processes in complex networks
• Emergence of innovations in networked populations with reputation-driven interactions
• Mean First Passage Time of the Symmetric Noisy Voter Model with Arbitrary Initial and Boundary Conditions
• The Impact of Network Connectivity on Collective Learning
• Robots as Actors in a Film: No War, A Robot Story
• Reputation-Driven Voting Dynamics
• Collective intelligence and the blockchain: Technology, communities and social experiments
• How Epidemic Psychology Works on Twitter: Evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S
• The emergence of segregation: from observable markers to group specific norms
• Exact solutions of the simplified March model for organizational learning