The effects of mass communication in a fuzzy linguistic framework of opinion dynamics

Abstract

The spreading and evolution of opinions is the key question studied in opinion dynamics. This is especially relevant in applications that depend on (possibly evolving) opinions, such as decision-making (the process of selecting an alternative from a set of possible options). In this work, we extend an existing communication framework of opinion dynamics in order to study the effects of mass communication, such as propaganda or advertisement campaigns. In this framework, fuzzy linguistic 2-tuples are used to represent opinions, which is a realistic representation of this qualitative information, and the communication is divided into three independent sub-processes, which represent the propagation of opinions in a more realistic manner, including a social network to represent agents' interactions and an awareness deactivation mechanism to model the awareness dynamics in the system (i.e., options for which agents have opinions). However, other sources of massive information can also influence opinions. To model them, in this work we present a mass communication mechanism, and integrate it in the previous communication framework. The resulting opinion dynamics model can be useful to analyze real-world scenarios where opinions evolve as a consequence of interactions between agents and also due to mass communication campaigns. In fact, our experimental results show that mass communication can have a major impact on the opinion evolution of the population.