The fragility of opinion formation in a complex world

Abstract How does the complexity of world around us affect reliability our opinions? Motivated by this question, we quantitatively study an opinion formation mechanism whereby uninformed observer gradually forms opinions about a composed subjects interrelated signed network mutual trust and distrust. We show numerically analytically that observer’s resulting are highly inconsistent (they tend to be independent initial opinions) unstable exhibit wide stochastic variations). Opinion inconsistency instability increase with world’s complexity, intended as number their interactions. This can prevented suitably expanding amount information. Our findings imply individual who initially trusts few credible information sources may end up trusting deceptive ones even if only small relations exist between sources.