Opinion dynamics under opposition

Opinion dynamics and wisdom under out-group discrimination

We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents of their ‘in-group’ and, in addition, they want to adjust their opinions to match the ‘inverse’ of those of the agents of their ‘out-group’. Our paradigm can account for persistent disagreement in con...

(Failure of the) Wisdom of the crowds in an endogenous opinion dynamics model with multiply biased agents

We study an endogenous opinion (or, belief) dynamics model where we endogenize the social network that models the link (‘trust’) weights between agents. Our network adjustment mechanism is simple: an agent increases her weight for another agent if that agent has been close to truth (whence, our adjustment criterion is ‘past performance’). Moreover, we consider multiply biased agents that do not...

Spontaneous emergence of contrarian-like behaviour in an opinion spreading model

– We introduce stochastic driving in the Sznajd model of opinion spreading. This stochastic effect is meant to mimic a social temperature, so that agents can take random decisions with a varying probability. We show that a stochastic driving has a tremendous impact on the system dynamics as a whole by inducing an order-disorder nonequilibrium phase transition. Interestingly, under certain condi...

Globalization and Public Opinion Characterizing the Opposition

Opinion dynamics: inhomogeneous Boltzmann-type equations modelling opinion leadership and political segregation

We propose and investigate different kinetic models for opinion formation, when the opinion formation process depends on an additional independent variable, e.g. a leadership or a spatial variable. More specifically, we consider: (i) opinion dynamics under the effect of opinion leadership, where each individual is characterised not only by its opinion, but also by another independent variable w...