OPINION DYNAMICS IN POPULATIONS WITH IMPLICIT COMMUNITY STRUCTURE

Abstract

Web encounter facilitate contacts between people from different communities outside space and time. Implicit Community Structure is exhibited because of highly connected links within community and sparse encounters between communities. Considering the imperceptible influence of encounter on opinions, Sznajd updating rules are used to mimic people's behaviors after encountering a stranger in another community. We introduce a model for opinion evolution, in which the interconnectivity between different communities is represented as encounter frequency, and leadership is introduced to control the strength of community's opinion guide. In this scenario, the effects of Implicit Community Structure of contact network on opinion evolution, for asymmetric and random initial distribution but with heterogeneous opinion guide, are investigated respectively. It is shown that large encounter frequency favors consensus of the whole populations and successful opinion spreading, which is qualitatively agree with the results observed in Majority model defined on substrates with predefined community structure.