Opinion and community formation in co-evolving networks
Abstract
In human societies opinion formation is mediated by social interactions, consequently taking place on a network of relationships and at the same time influencing the structure of the network and its evolution. To investigate this co-evolution of opinions and social interaction structure we develop a dynamic agent-based network model, by taking into account short range interactions like discussions between individuals, long range interactions like a sense for overall mood modulated by the attitudes of individuals, and external field corresponding to outside influence. Moreover, individual biases can be naturally taken into account. In addition the model includes the opinion dependent link-rewiring scheme to describe network topology co-evolution with a slower time scale than that of the opinion formation. With this model comprehensive numerical simulations and mean field calculations have been carried out and they show the importance of the separation between fast and slow time scales resulting in the network to organize as well-connected small communities of agents with the same opinion.Keywords
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