The Spread of Opinions in Societies

We demonstrate the role of sociocultural factors in understanding opinion dynamics. We start by assessing theoretical models of opinion spread whose parameters are dependent on sociocultural factors. First, we model the dynamics of opinion spread in communities with both static social and dynamic social networks using the Binary Agreement (BAM) and Threshold (TM) Models to recreate the evolution empirically observed in the data. Then, we examine the unique set of behavioral network data on social interactions (based on electronic logs of dyadic contact via smartphones) collected at the University of Notre Dame. The participants are a sample of members of the freshmen class of 2011 whose opinions on political and social issues have been regularly recorded—at the beginning and end of each semester—for the last three years. Then, we measure the evolution of participants' opinions and ascertain the quantitative dependence on the cultural traits of individuals and the structural properties of social networks that they form. Our analysis shows that ties among people who are more likely to share opinions (e.g. of the same race, gender, or socioeconomic class) decay slower than ties among persons who are likely to have different opinions. The analysis also indicates that the partner selection of individuals is correlated with sharing a (political) opinion. Results show sociocultural factors and social network dynamics both influence the evolution of opinions in multicultural social networks.