Agent-based opinion formation modeling in social network: A perspective of social psychology

Abstract

Prior studies on opinion modeling focus on nonlinear physics or statistical physics methods, or simulating the opinion interaction merely by the principle of the minority being subordinate to the majority, which falls short on theoretically illustrating how the opinion interaction is affect by multiple factors relevant to both parties. This paper is motivated to propose an agent-based online opinion formation model based on attitude change theory, group behavior theory and evolutionary game theory in the perspective of sociology and psychology. In this model, there are three factors influencing the persuasion process, including credibility of the leaders, characteristic of the recipient, and situation. The proposed model is applied to Twitter to analyze the influence of topic type, parameter changing, and opinion leaders on opinion formation. Experimental results show that the opinion formation of controversial topic shows greater uncertainty and sustainability. The ratio of game benefit to cost has a significant impact on opinion formation and a moderate ratio will result in the longest relaxation time or most unified global opinions. Furthermore, celebrities with a large amount of followers are more capable of influencing public opinion than experts. This paper enriches the researches on opinion formation modeling, and the results provide managerial insights for business on public relations and market prediction.