Topological bifurcations in a model society of reasonable contrarians

Abstract

People are often divided into conformists and contrarians, the former tending to align to the majority opinion in their neighborhood and the latter tending to disagree with that majority. In practice, however, the contrarian tendency is rarely followed when there is an overwhelming majority with a given opinion, which denotes a social norm. Such reasonable contrarian behavior is often considered a mark of independent thought and can be a useful strategy in financial markets. We present the opinion dynamics of a society of reasonable contrarian agents. The model is a cellular automaton of Ising type, with antiferromagnetic pair interactions modeling contrarianism and plaquette terms modeling social norms. We introduce the entropy of the collective variable as a way of comparing deterministic (mean-field) and probabilistic (simulations) bifurcation diagrams. In the mean-field approximation the model exhibits bifurcations and a chaotic phase, interpreted as coherent oscillations of the whole society. However, in a one-dimensional spatial arrangement one observes incoherent oscillations and a constant average. In simulations on Watts-Strogatz networks with a small-world effect the mean-field behavior is recovered, with a bifurcation diagram that resembles the mean-field one but where the rewiring probability is used as the control parameter. Similar bifurcation diagrams are found for scale-free networks, and we are able to compute an effective connectivity for such networks.