A Dynamical Model of Growth of Membership to an Opinion

Abstract

Many social processes, from elections to terrorism, depend on growth of memberships to opinions. In a generic sense, an opinion is a proposition that for an individual has financial, cultural and emotional impli-cations. The individual responses in turn create a ‘social response’ which influences the individual response resulting in a dynamical system with two-way feed-backs. We consider a set of deterministic dynamical equations that describe individual response to a class of prescribed opinions. The time-dependent opinion dynamics model exhibits nearly complete acceptance to nearly complete rejection with complex evolution, providing the framework for a mechanistic descrip-tion of opinion formation.