Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Belief System Dynamics under Logic Constraints

Abstract

Opinion formation cannot be modeled solely as an ideological deduction from a set of principles; rather, repeated social interactions and logic constraints among statements are consequential in the construct of belief systems. We address three basic questions in the analysis of social opinion dynamics: (i) Will a belief system converge? (ii) How long does it take to converge? (iii) Where does it converge? We provide graph-theoretic answers to these questions for a model of opinion dynamics of a belief system with logic constraints. Our results make plain the implicit dependence of the convergence properties of a belief system on the underlying social network and on the set of logic constraints that relate beliefs on different statements. Moreover, we provide an explicit analysis of a variety of commonly used large-scale network models.

References in corpus (5)

• A Tutorial on Modeling and Analysis of Dynamic Social Networks. Part I
• Novel Multidimensional Models of Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks
• Critical random graphs: Diameter and mixing time
• Opinion evolution in time-varying social influence networks with prejudiced agents
• The Evolution of the Mixing Rate