Opinion dynamics involving contrarian and independence behaviors based on the Sznajd model with two-two and three-one agent interactions

Abstract

We investigate the opinion evolution of outflow dynamics based on the Sznajd model on a complete graph involving contrarian and independence behaviors. We consider a group of four spins representing the social agents with the following scenarios: (1) scenario two-two with contrarian agents or independence agents and (2) scenario three-one with contrarian or independence agents. All of them undergo a second-order phase transition according to our simulation. The critical point decreases exponentially as λ and f increase, where λ and f are contrarian and flexibility factors, respectively. Furthermore, we find that the critical point of scenario three-one is smaller than that of scenario two-two. For the same level of λ and f, the critical point of the scenario involving independence is smaller than the scenario with contrarian agents. From a sociophysics point of view, we observe that scenario three-one can likely reach a stalemate situation rather than scenario two-two. Surprisingly, the scenarios involving contrarians have a higher probability of achieving a consensus than a scenario involving independence. Our estimates of the critical exponents indicate that the model is still in the same universality class as the mean-field Ising model.