Abstract
Opinion dynamics focuses on the opinion evolution in a social community. Recently, some models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence were proposed by Deffuant and Krause, et al. In the literature, agents were generally assumed to have a homogeneous confidence level. This paper proposes an extended model for a group of agents with heterogeneous confidence levels. First, a social differentiation theory is introduced and a social group is divided into opinion subgroups with distinct confidence levels. Second, a multi-level heterogeneous opinion formation model is formulated under the framework of bounded confidence. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to study the collective opinion evolution, focusing on three key factors: the fractions of heterogeneous agents, the initial opinions, and the group size. The simulation results demonstrate that the number of final opinions depends on the fraction of close-minded agents when the group size and the initial opinions are fixed; the final opinions converge more easily when the initial opinions are closer; and the number of final opinions can be approximately modeled by a linear increasing function of the group size and the increasing rate is the fraction of close-minded agents.
Highlights
In March 2011, the panic buying of iodized salt and iodine pills was triggered in Canada, China, Russia’s Far East, and United States after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident
It is reasonable to assume that agents have heterogeneous confidence levels and important to investigate how the collective opinions evolve under such an assumption and address some open problems
We investigate the impacts of the three key factors: the fractions of heterogeneous agents, the non-uniformly distributed initial opinions and the group size, on the extended opinion formation model (2) by a series of computer simulations
Summary
In March 2011, the panic buying of iodized salt and iodine pills was triggered in Canada, China, Russia’s Far East, and United States after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. It was mostly caused by the rumor that iodized salt and iodine tablets could help ward off radiation poisoning, despite the government and health officials’ statements that potassium iodide is not anti-radiation. Because the human opinion propagation is an outcome of multistage physiological and psychological processes, it is challenging to collect the dynamics of individual consciousness and define the way of an individual interacts with others. As a macroscopic collective social phenomenon, has been a popular research topic in physics, mathematics, social psychology, computer science, anthropology, and management science
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