An application of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model to adolescent smoking initiation

Abstract

We investigated the impact of peers’ opinions on the smoking initiation process among adolescents. We applied the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model to study how social interactions change adolescents’ opinions and behaviors about smoking. Through agent-based modeling (ABM), we simulated a population of 2500 adolescents and compared smoking prevalence to data from 9 cohorts of adolescents in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from year 2001 till 2014. Our model adjusts well for NSDUH data according to pseudo R2 values, which are at least 96%. Optimal parameter values indicate that adolescents exhibit imitator characteristics with regard to smoking opinions. The imitator characteristics suggests that teenagers tend to update their opinions consistently according to what others do, and these opinions later translate into smoking behaviors. As a result, peer influence from social networks plays a big role in the smoking initiation process and should be an important driver in policy formulation.

Social Influence of Competing Groups and Leaders in Opinion Dynamics

“…Models have explored group decision making in various contexts including firms and small committees (Galam 1997), voting behaviour (González et al 2004;Bernardes et al 2002), how to convince others (Stauffer 2003), making political predictions (Galam 2017), modelling the impact of social influence on the prices of options (Oster and Feigel 2015) and the modelling of industrial strikes in big companies (Galam et al 1982). Across sociology, psychology, politics, public policy and business, there have been a number of relevant studies including: experiments to explore the effect of social influence on judgment shifts (Moussaïd et al 2013), understanding the psychological factors affecting opinion formation with an application to American politics (Duggins 2017), the initiation of smoking amongst adolescents (Sun and Mendez 2017) and consensus reaching in social network group decision making (Dong et al 2018(Dong et al , 2017.…”

Network generation and evolution based on spatial and opinion dynamics components

“…It has also suggested a framework for discrete [55] as well as continuous opinion models [56]. Those characteristics allowed the study of problems such as the evolution of extremism [57], the emergence of extremism in a society of moderate agents [58,59], and the adoption of addictive behaviors [60,61]. Effects of different networks of agents for the CODA model and variants have been studied [62,63].…”

Agent mental models and Bayesian rules as a tool to create opinion dynamics models

“…Bayesian rules to model opinions have been introduced both in the opinion dynamics community, as extensions of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) [8,9] and similar opinion models [9,21,27,34,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,28], by the use of Bayesian belief networks [68], as well as, independently, in models associated to economical reasoning [69,70,71,72,73,74]. Despite their popularity, there are two aspects of Bayesian-inspired models for opinion dynamics that have not been properly debated so far.…”