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In this age of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion polarization, the spread of propaganda and fake news, and the manipulation of sentiment are of interest to large numbers of organizations and people, some of whom are resource rich. Whether it is the more nefarious players such as foreign governments that are attempting to sway elections or large corporations that are trying to bend sentiment -- often quite surreptitiously, or it is more open and above board, like researchers that want to spread the news of some finding or some business interest that wants to make a large group of people aware of genuinely helpful innovations that they are marketing, what is at stake is often significant. In this paper we review many of the classical, and some of the new, social interaction models aimed at understanding opinion dynamics. While the first papers studying opinion dynamics appeared over 60 years ago, there is still a great deal of room for innovation and exploration. We believe that the political climate and the extraordinary (even unprecedented) events in the sphere of politics in the last few years will inspire new interest and new ideas. It is our aim to help those interested researchers understand what has already been explored in a significant portion of the field of opinion dynamics. We believe that in doing this, it will become clear that there is still much to be done.
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Modelling efforts in opinion dynamics have to a large extent ignored that opinion exchange between individuals can also have an effect on how willing they are to express their opinion publicly. Here, we introduce a model of public opinion expression. Two groups of agents with different opinion on an issue interact with each other, changing the willingness to express their opinion according to whether they perceive themselves as part of the majority or minority opinion. We formulate the model as a multi-group majority game and investigate the Nash equilibria. We also provide a dynamical systems perspective: Using the reinforcement learning algorithm of $Q$-learning, we reduce the $N$-agent system in a mean-field approach to two dimensions which represent the two opinion groups. This two-dimensional system is analyzed in a comprehensive bifurcation analysis of its parameters. The model identifies social-structural conditions for public opinion predominance of different groups. Among other findings, we show under which circumstances a minority can dominate public discourse.
In Hopfield neural networks with up to 10^8 nodes we store two patterns through Hebb couplings. Then we start with a third random pattern which is supposed to evolve into one of the two stored patterns, simulating the cognitive process of associative memory leading to one of two possible opinions. With probability p each neuron independently, instead of following the Hopfield rule, takes over the corresponding value of another network, thus simulating how different people can convince each other. A consensus is achieved for high p.
We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by the social neighbours -- weighted by their mutual similarity on other issues. Agents are, therefore, more influenced by neighbours with similar worldviews (set of opinions on various issues), resulting in a complex co-evolution of each opinion. Simulations show that the worldview evolution exhibits events of intermittent polarization when the social network is scale-free. This, in turn, trigger extreme crashes and surges in the popularity of various opinions. Using the proposed model, we highlight the role of network structure, bounded rationality of agents, and the role of key influential agents in causing polarization and intermittent reformation of worldviews on scale-free networks.
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. left vs. right) and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized facts as emergent properties of an opinion dynamics in a multi-dimensional space of continuous opinions. The mechanisms for the change of agents opinions in this multi-dimensional space are derived from cognitive dissonance theory and structural balance theory. We test assumptions from proximity voting and from directional voting regarding their ability to reproduce the expected emerging properties. We further study how the emotional involvement of agents, i.e. their individual resistance to change opinions, impacts the dynamics. We identify two regimes for the global and the individual alignment of opinions. If the affective involvement is high and shows a large variance across agents, this fosters the emergence of a dominant ideological dimension. Agents align their opinions along this dimension in opposite directions, i.e. create a state of polarization.
We extend simple opinion models to obtain stable but continuously evolving communities. Our scope is to meet a challenge raised by sociologists of generating structures that last from non lasting entities. We achieve this by introducing two kinds of noise on a standard opinion model. First, agents may interact with other agents even if their opinion difference is large. Second, agents randomly change their opinion at a constant rate. We show that for a large range of control parameters, our model yields stable and fluctuating polarized states, where the composition and mean opinion of the emerging groups is fluctuating over time.
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