1. A Weighted-Median Model of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
- Author
-
Mohr, Lasse, Hjorth, Poul G., and Porter, Mason A.
- Subjects
Physics - Physics and Society ,Computer Science - Social and Information Networks ,Mathematics - Dynamical Systems ,Nonlinear Sciences - Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems - Abstract
Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions result in a consensus opinion; in others, they result in opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of "echo chambers". Consider a social network of individuals, who hold continuous-valued scalar opinions and change their opinions when they interact with each other. In such an opinion model, it is common for an opinion-update rule to depend on the mean opinion of interacting individuals. However, we consider an alternative update rule - which may be more realistic in some situations - that instead depends on a weighted median opinion of interacting individuals. Through numerical simulations of our opinion model, we investigate how the limit opinion distribution depends on network structure. For configuration-model networks, we also derive a mean-field approximation for the asymptotic dynamics of the opinion distribution when there are infinitely many individuals in a network., Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, Submitted to SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems
- Published
- 2024