The influence of contrarians in the dynamics of opinion formation

Abstract

In this work we consider the presence of contrarian agents in discrete 3-state kinetic exchange opinion models. The contrarians are individuals that adopt the choice opposite to the prevailing choice of their contacts, whatever this choice is. We consider binary as well as three-agent interactions, with stochastic parameters, in a fully-connected population. Our numerical results suggest that the presence of contrarians destroys the absorbing state of the original model, changing the transition to the para-ferromagnetic type. In this case, the consequence for the society is that the three opinions coexist in the population, in both phases (ordered and disordered). Furthermore, the order-disorder transition is suppressed for a sufficient large fraction of contrarians. In some cases the transition is discontinuous, and it changes to continuous before it is suppressed. Some of our results are complemented by analytical calculations based on the master equation.

13 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Physica A

References in corpus (2)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Impact of site dilution and agent diffusion on the critical behavior of the majority-vote model

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Deviations from the Majority: A Local Flip Model
• Double transition in kinetic exchange opinion models with activation dynamics
• Role of inflexible minorities in the evolution of alcohol consumption
• Contrarian Voter Model under the influence of an Oscillating Propaganda: Consensus, Bimodal behavior and Stochastic Resonance
• A simple mechanism leading to first-order phase transitions in a model of tax evasion
• Collective patterns and stable misunderstandings in networks striving for consensus without a common value system
• Models of Opinion Dynamics with Random Parametrisation
• Impact of memory and bias in kinetic exchange opinion models on random networks