Survival of extreme opinions

Jiann-wien Hsu and Ding-wei Huang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2009, vol. 388, issue 24, 4991-4998

Abstract: We study the survival of extreme opinions in various processes of consensus formation. All the opinions are treated equally and subjected to the same rules of changing. We investigate three typical models to reach a consensus in each case: (A) personal influence, (B) influence from surroundings, and (C) influence to surroundings. Starting with uniformly distributed random opinions, our calculated results show that the extreme opinions can survive in both models (A) and (B), but not in model (C). We obtain a conclusion that both personal influence and passive adaptation to the environment are not sufficient enough to eradicate all the extreme opinions. Only the active persuasion to change the surroundings eliminates the extreme opinions completely.

Keywords: Sociophysics; Opinion dynamics; Consensus formation; Extreme opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:388:y:2009:i:24:p:4991-4998

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.08.025

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