Socio-cultural Evolution of Opinion Dynamics in Networked Societies

This paper introduces a modeling paradigm based on a language theoretic framework for stochastic simulation of decision-making in a social setting, where choices and decisions by individuals are increasingly being influenced by a person’s online social interactions. In this paper, the dynamics of opinion formation in a networked society have been studied with a joint model that bridges micro-level decisions based on reward maximization and the corresponding social influences which alter the estimate of these reward values. The effect of long term government policies on the stability and dynamics of the population opinion and the effect of including an influencing agent group has been studied. Simulated results on a sample society demonstrate the major impact of a relatively small but sharply opinionated influencing group toward pushing the society toward a desired outcome.