COLLECTIVE POLITICAL OPINION FORMATION IN NONLINEAR SOCIAL INTERACTION

Collective Political Opinion Formation in Nonlinear Social Interaction

We have presented a numerical model of a collective opinion formation procedure to explain political phenomena such as two-party and multi-party systems in politics, political unrest, military coup d’etats and netizen revolutions. Nonlinear interaction with binary and independent decision making processes can yield various collective behaviors or collective political opinions. Statistical physi...

Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation

Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears duri...

Opinion Formation and Social Systems

Social Structure and Opinion Formation

We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. ...

Persistent instability in polarized opinion formation and collective decision-making

In this article we present a simple model of opinion formation and collective decision making, which identifies the conditions for unstable, non-linear outcomes of these processes. We propose a simple modification of the commonly used model of French from 1957: social actors change their influence in order to avoid a future outcome they do not like. The analysis of a simple, 3-member group show...