Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions
Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions
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DOI：
10.1016/j.physd.2015.10.013
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发表时间：
2016-06-01
影响因子：
4
通讯作者：
Latora, Vito
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Battiston, Federico;Cairoli, Andrea;Latora, Vito
社会系统中主体意见的形成是多种驱动力之间复杂平衡的结果。一方面，同伴施加的社会压力有利于局部共识的产生。另一方面，智能体同时参与不同主题的讨论，促使每个智能体在他/她参与的所有主题中形成一套连贯的观点。此外，外部刺激的普遍作用，如大众媒体，将整个人口拉向对不同主题的特定意见配置。在这里，我们提出了一个模型，在这个模型中，具有相互关联观点的智能体，在代表不同主题的几个层面上相互作用，倾向于将自己的观点传播到他们的邻居，努力保持内部一致性，因为每个智能体在不同主题的观点之间识别有意义的关系，同时受到外部领域的影响，类似于大众媒体的压力。我们表明，由代理分配给不同意见的内部耦合中存在异质性，允许获得具有混合共识水平的状态，仍然确保所有代理获得一致的意见集。此外，我们表明，在热噪声存在的情况下，所有观察到的模型特征都保持到临界温度，在此之后，不再能够达到全局共识。这表明我们的结果与现实社会系统的相关性，在现实社会系统中，噪音不可避免地以信息不确定性和误解的形式存在。该模型还展示了大众媒体如何有效地用于支持特定观点的传播，从而使整个人口的共识两极分化。(C) 2015 Elsevier B.V.版权所有
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 favors 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/she is active. Moreover, the pervasive 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 neighborhood, 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 favor the propagation of a chosen set of opinions, thus polarizing the consensus of an entire population. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.