Symmetry breaking by heating in a continuous opinion model.

Abstract

We study the critical behavior of a continuous opinion model, driven by kinetic exchanges in a fully connected population. Opinions range in the real interval [-1,1], representing the different shades of opinions against and for an issue under debate. Individuals' opinions evolve through pairwise interactions, with couplings that are typically positive, but a fraction p of negative ones is allowed. Moreover, a social temperature parameter T controls the tendency of the individual responses toward neutrality. Depending on p and T, different collective states emerge: symmetry broken (one side wins), symmetric (tie of opposite sides), and absorbing neutral (indecision wins). We find the critical points and exponents that characterize the phase transitions between them. The symmetry breaking transition belongs to the usual Ising mean-field universality class, but the absorbing-phase transitions, with β=0.5, are out of the paradigmatic directed percolation class. Moreover, ordered phases can emerge by increasing social temperature.