Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions

Abstract

The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand, the concurrent participation of agents to discussions on different topics induces each agent to develop a coherent set of opinions across all the topics in which he is active. Moreover, the prevasive action of external stimuli, such as mass media, pulls the entire population towards a specific configuration of opinions on different topics. Here we propose a model in which agents with interrelated opinions, interacting on several layers representing different topics, tend to spread their own ideas to their neighbourhood, strive to maintain internal coherence, due to the fact that each agent identifies meaningful relationships among its opinions on the different topics, and are at the same time subject to external fields, resembling the pressure of mass media. We show that the presence of heterogeneity in the internal coupling assigned by agents to their different opinions allows to obtain states with mixed levels of consensus, still ensuring that all the agents attain a coherent set of opinions. Furthermore, we show that all the observed features of the model are preserved in the presence of thermal noise up to a critical temperature, after which global consensus is no longer attainable. This suggests the relevance of our results for real social systems, where noise is inevitably present in the form of information uncertainty and misunderstandings. The model also demonstrates how mass media can be effectively used to favour the propagation of a chosen set of opinions, thus polarising the consensus of an entire population.

A generalized voter model with time-decaying memory on a multilayer network

“…F. Battiston et al have also studied the heterogeneity effect depending upon the voter model [62]. They have found that the relative weight assigned to social pressure, internal coherence and external mean-field force has a great impact on the occurrence of phase transitions between a disordered system and an ordered system, which is similar to the role of the heterogeneous influence of peer pressure in our model.…”

Determinants of public cooperation in multiplex networks

“…where i x is the coherence of the strategies of player i. across the M different layers. A similar definition of coherence for the particular case M = 2 has been reported in [78]. In addition to the two main order parameters c and ξ, when M = 2, we will also use the quantities c c…”

Measuring and modeling correlations in multiplex networks

“…The first papers on the subject have focused on the characterization of the structure of multiplex networks [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], and on modeling the basic mechanisms of their growth [29][30][31][32][33]. In parallel to this, some effort has been also devoted on investigating various kinds of dynamical processes on multiplex topologies, including diffusion [34][35][36][37][38], epidemic spreading [39][40][41][42][43][44], cooperation [45][46][47][48], opinion formation [49][50][51][52], and percolation [46,[53][54][55][56].…”