Modeling Education and Advertising with Opinion Dynamics

Thomas Moore,Theresa Brown,Bridget Ambrose,Robert Glass,Nancy Brodsky,Patrick Finley,Benjamin Apelberg

doi:10.18564/jasss.2680

Abstract

We present a modified Deffuant-Weisbuch opinion dynamics model that integrates the influence of media campaigns on opinion. Media campaigns promote messages intended to inform and influence the opinions of the targeted audiences through factual and emotional appeals. Media campaigns take many forms: brand-specific advertisements, promotions, and sponsorships, political, religious, or social messages, and public health and educational communications. We illustrate model-based analysis of campaigns using tobacco advertising and public health education as examples. In this example, 'opinion' is not just an individual's attitude towards smoking, but the integration of a wide range of factors that influence the likelihood that an individual will decide to smoke, such as knowledge, perceived risk, perceived utility and affective evaluations of smoking. This model captures the ability of a media campaign to cause a shift in network-level average opinion, and the inability of a media message to do so if it promotes too extreme a viewpoint for a given target audience. Multiple runs displayed strong heterogeneity in response to media campaigns as the difference between network average initial opinion and broadcasted media opinion increased, with some networks responding ideally and others being largely unaffected. In addition, we show that networks that display community structure can be made more susceptible to be influenced by a media campaign by a complementary campaign focused on increasing tolerance to other opinions in targeted nodes with high betweenness centrality. Similarly, networks can be 'inoculated' against advertising campaigns by a media campaign that decreases tolerance.

Highlights

1.1 Opinion dynamics models are a computational realization of Cartwright and Harary's (1956) structural balance theory, under which individuals' opinions regarding other people or ideas are influenced by those with whom they share affective social ties
1.7 In this paper, we extend an existing opinion dynamics model to include the effects of media influences
1.8 This paper presents a model that incorporates media influences into a standard opinion dynamics framework, expanding the concept of opinion spread to include opinion sources outside of traditionally realized social networks

Summary

Introduction

1.1 Opinion dynamics models are a computational realization of Cartwright and Harary's (1956) structural balance theory, under which individuals' opinions regarding other people or ideas are influenced by those with whom they share affective social ties. Heterogeneity in the plasticity value (analogous to edge weight in this model, and represented by μ in the presented equations), not explored in this paper, can express whether a media node has more or less influence than a peer This model differs in that the social networks presented are not the lattice structures presented in [1], but rather directed random graphs using Erdős–Renyi (i.e., Bernoulli) and Barabasi–Albert (i.e., scale-free) topologies. Direct promotion is the most common media pathway, whereby the marketer attempts to shift the opinions of people in the population to a favorable one regarding products, behaviors, or ideas Examples of this type of influence include tobacco advertisements that, prior to modern advertising restrictions, directly advocated smoking, promoting cigarettes as healthy options for weight and stress control (National Cancer Institute 2008).

Results

Conclusions

Funding Statement