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In recent months, the figure of Greta Thunberg and the theme of climate changings quickly became the focus of the debate. This has led to a polarization effect in opinion forming about the climate subject. Starting from the analysis of this phenomenon, we develop an opinion dynamics model in which several types of contrarian agents are considered. Each agent is supposed to have an opinion on several topics related to each other; thus, the opinions being formed on these topics are also mutually dependent. The aim of the paper is to investigate the indirect effects of contrarian agents on the collective opinion about these topics. Several numerical tests are presented in order to highlight the main features of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an empirical study of the opinion dynamics of a large-scale sample of online social network users. We estimate users' opinions as continuous scalars based on their subscriptions to information sources and analyze how friendship connections affect the dynamics of these estimations. Distinguishing between positive (toward friends' opinions) and negative (away from friends' opinions) opinion shifts, we find that the existence and magnitude of both types of shifts are positively related (largely through linear or inverted U-shaped form) to the distance in opinions between a user and their friends. The distance additionally moderates the balance between positive and negative movements: if the distance is within a certain moderate range, there is a relatively high chance of a positive shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we extend the voter model (VM) and the threshold voter model (TVM) to include external influences modeled as a jump process. We study the newly-formulated models both analytically and computationally, employing diffusion approximations and mean field approximations. We derive results pertaining to the probability of reaching consensus on a particular opinion and also the expected consensus time. We find that although including an external influence leads to a faster consensus in general, this effect is more pronounced in the VM as compared to the TVM. Our findings suggest the potential importance of external influences in addition to local interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less vigorous on small differences of opinion than large differences. Opinion differences that may be measured on the real number line may not directly correspond to the subjective importance of an issue and extent of resistance to opinion change. This is a hard problem for the field of opinion dynamics, a field that has become increasingly prominent as it has attracted more contributions to it from investigators in the natural and engineering sciences. The paper contributes a scale-free approach to assessing the extents to which individuals, with unknown heterogeneous resistances to influence, have been influenced by the opinions of others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]