Vanishing Opinions in Latané Model of Opinion Formation

Abstract

In this paper, the results of computer simulations based on the Nowak–Szamrej–Latané model with multiple (from two to five) opinions available in the system are presented. We introduce the noise discrimination level (which says how small the clusters of agents could be considered negligible) as a quite useful quantity that allows qualitative characterization of the system. We show that depending on the introduced noise discrimination level, the range of actors’ interactions (controlled indirectly by an exponent in the distance scaling function, the larger the exponent, the more influential the nearest neighbors are) and the information noise level (modeled as social temperature, which increases results in the increase in randomness in taking the opinion by the agents), the ultimate number of the opinions (measured as the number of clusters of actors sharing the same opinion in clusters greater than the noise discrimination level) may be smaller than the number of opinions available in the system. These are observed in small and large information noise limits but result in either unanimity, or polarization, or randomization of opinions.

Phase Diagram for Social Impact Theory in Initially Fully Differentiated Society

“…Its quantitative meaning was delivered recently in Ref. [37] where it was shown that for α = 2, about 25% of the impact comes from only nine nearest neighbours. This ratio increases to approximately 59%, 80% and 96% for α = 3, 4 and 6, respectively.…”

“…In these models, usually only binary opinions are considered, which naturally causes society polarisation. However, modifications that allow for multiple opinions were also studied [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

“…The earlier attempts to employ this model for sociophysical studies included: observing the influence of the strong leader on opinion formation [50]; studying the noise-induced order/disorder phase transition [35,51]; searching for self-organised criticality in opinion systems [36]; observing the disappearance of some opinions [37] (see Ref. [52] for review).…”

“…Namely, we build a phase diagram in the social temperature and the effective range of the interaction space based on the number of surviving opinions; numbers of clusters of opinions; and the probability distribution of the size of the largest cluster. Unlike previous works-where the number of available opinions was usually small (two [50,51], up to three [36], or up to five [35,37])-we proposed as a starting point a situation in which each actor has their own opinion.…”

Conformity and Mass Media Influence in the Sznajd Model on Regular Lattices

“…Researchers have addressed many important questions using these models in theoretical studies and computer simulations. Some recent developments have been made, for example, on the problem of consensus [11,12], divided communities and polarization [13][14][15][16][17], factors influencing the dynamics of opinion [18,19] (e.g., the so-called social temperature [20]), vanishing opinions [21], or the impact of mass media and advertising on the dynamics of opinion [22][23][24]. Various underlying lattices have been used [25], and behavior resembling phase transition (in a strict sense possible only in the thermodynamic limit) has received a lot of attention [26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”