Social consensus and tipping points with opinion inertia

Social consensus and tipping points with opinion inertia

When opinions, behaviors or ideas diffuse within a population, some are invariably stickier than others. The stickier the opinion, behavior or idea, the greater is an individual’s inertia to replace it with an alternative. Here we study the effect of stickiness of opinions in a two-opinion model, where individuals change their opinion only after a certain number of consecutive encounters with t...

Tipping Points, Abrupt Opinion Changes, and Punctuated Policy Change

Social tipping points and Earth systems dynamics

1 Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Bristol University, Bristol, UK 2 Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK 3 Institute of Hazard , Risk and Resilience, Durham University, Durham, UK 4 School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK 5 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK 6 Durham University Business School, Dur...

The Effects of Communication Burstiness on Consensus Formation and Tipping Points in Social Dynamics

Current models for opinion dynamics typically utilize a Poisson process for speaker selection, making the waiting time between events exponentially distributed. Human interaction tends to be bursty though, having higher probabilities of either extremely short waiting times or long periods of silence. To quantify the burstiness effects on the dynamics of social models, we place in competition tw...

Analytic Treatment of Tipping Points for Social Consensus in Large Random Networks

We introduce a homogeneous pair approximation to the naming game (NG) model by deriving a six-dimensional Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) for the two-word naming game. Our ODE reveals the change in dynamical behavior of the naming game as a function of the average degree {k} of an uncorrelated network. This result is in good agreement with the numerical results. We also analyze the extended NG model...