Phase Transition in Opinion Diffusion in Social Networks

Abstract

Gossiping models have been increasingly applied to study social network phenomena, in particular, to model the dynamics of social behavior or belief through local interactions. In this context, this paper investigates how the opinions of social agents diffuse in a network under a so-called hard-interaction model, in which the agents interact more strongly with neighbors that share their beliefs and have no influence on the neighbors whose opinions differ by more than a threshold. We analyze the convergence properties of the opinion dynamics and provide analytical insights to characterize the phase transition from a society of radicalized opinions to one of convergent behavior.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA563948

Entities

People

  • Ananthram Swami
  • Anna Scaglione
  • Lin Li
  • Qing Zhao

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Computer Simulations
  • Convergence
  • Differential Equations
  • Diffusion
  • Dynamics
  • Equations
  • Nonlinear Dynamics
  • Phase Transformations
  • Political Science
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Simulations
  • Social Networks
  • Societies
  • Transitions

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Theoretical Analysis.