Abstract
Seeking truth is an important objective of agents in social groups. Opinion leaders in social groups may help or hinder the other agents on seeking the truth by symmetric nature. This paper studies the impact of opinion leaders by considering four characteristics of opinion leaders—reputation, stubbornness, appeal, and extremeness—on the truth-seeking behavior of agents based on a bounded confidence model. Simulations show that increasing the appeal of the leader whose opinion is opposite to the truth has a straightforward impact, i.e., it normally prevents the agents from finding the truth. On the other hand, it also makes the agents who start out close to the truth move away from the truth by increasing the group bound of confidence, if there is an opinion leader opposite to the truth. The results demonstrate that the opinion of the leader is important in affecting the normal agents to reach the truth. Furthermore, for some cases, small variations of the parameters defining the agents’ characteristics can lead to large scale changes in the social group.
Highlights
IntroductionStudies on opinion dynamics have been made from a variety of domains and aspects, e.g., philosophy, sociology, economics, politics, and physics [3,4,5,6]
Opinion dynamics has been an important research topic regarding social network field for a long time, which studies the group behavior of a group of interacting agents who hold beliefs or opinions towards given topics, which might be the same as or different to that of the others [1,2].Studies on opinion dynamics have been made from a variety of domains and aspects, e.g., philosophy, sociology, economics, politics, and physics [3,4,5,6]
We explore the impact of the four characteristics of opinion leaders, reputation, stubbornness, appeal, and extremeness on the dynamics of the group by varying their values
Summary
Studies on opinion dynamics have been made from a variety of domains and aspects, e.g., philosophy, sociology, economics, politics, and physics [3,4,5,6]. In these models, the agents interact with each other and gain information from external sources to reach consensus or seek truth [7], and it is noted that the agents in a group want to achieve a consensus, and hope the consensus is close to the truth as much as possible in many cases, referred to as ‘correct consensus’ by Zollman [8]. Based on the Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model [13,14], Douven and Riegler [15] have shown that introducing the truth, estimated from experimental data, has a dramatic effect on group opinion dynamics: all the agents will converge at the truth sooner or later
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