Abstract
Asymmetry in contrarian behavior is investigated within the Galam model of opinion dynamics using update groups of size 3 with two competing opinions A and B. Denoting x and y the respective proportions of A and B contrarians, four schemes of implementations are studied. The first scheme activates contrarians after each series of updates with probabilities x and y for agents holding respectively opinion A and B. Second scheme activates contrarians within the update groups only against global majority with probability x when A is the majority and y when B is the majority. The third scheme considers in-group contrarians acting prior to the local majority update against both local majority and minority opinions. The last scheme activates in-group contrarians prior to the local majority update but only against the local majority. The main result is the loss of the fifty–fifty attractor produced by symmetric contrarians. Producing a bit less contrarians on its own side than the other side becomes the key to win a public debate, which in turn can guarantee an election victory. The associated phase diagram of opinion dynamics is found to exhibit a rich variety of counterintuitive results.
Highlights
The modeling of opinion dynamics is one of the major topics of sociophysics studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12].Most discrete models consider the dynamics of two competing choices among identical agents, who all follow the same update rule while involved in a discussion with others
Contrarians are always activated within the update group, we could consider that contrarianism is activated at a contrarian agent only when this agent finds itself in an initial local majority in a group
Asymmetric contrarians were shown to generate four different schemes to account for the effect on the associated opinion dynamics
Summary
The modeling of opinion dynamics is one of the major topics of sociophysics studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Most discrete models consider the dynamics of two competing choices among identical agents, who all follow the same update rule while involved in a discussion with others. The contrarian feature is defined as an additional feature to “normal” behavior of agents following local majority rules for updating their respective opinions once they are discussing in small groups. Once a majority has crystallized within the discussing group, while all normal agents adopt it, the contrarian chooses to adopt the opposite one It may be preserving its initial opinions. These schemes are respectively (i) post-update local asymmetric contrarians; (ii) post-update global asymmetric contrarians; (iii) in-group asymmetric contrarians with majority/minority contrarians; (iv) in-group asymmetric contrarians with in-group majority contrarians.
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