A fundamental aspect of society is the exchange and discussion of opinions between individuals, occurring in situations as varied as company boardrooms, elementary school classrooms and online social media. After a ve...A fundamental aspect of society is the exchange and discussion of opinions between individuals, occurring in situations as varied as company boardrooms, elementary school classrooms and online social media. After a very brief introduction to the established results of the most fundamental opinion dynamics models, which seek to mathematically capture observed social phenomena, a brief discussion follows on several recent themes pursued by the authors building on the fundamental ideas. In the first theme, we study the way an individual′s self-confidence can develop through contributing to discussions on a sequence of topics, reaching a consensus in each case,where the consensus value to some degree reflects the contribution of that individual to the conclusion. During this process, the individuals in the network and the way they interact can change. The second theme introduces a novel discrete-time model of opinion dynamics to study how discrepancies between an individual′s expressed and private opinions can arise due to stubbornness and a pressure to conform to a social norm. It is also shown that a few extremists can create "pluralistic ignorance", where people believe there is majority support for a position but in fact the position is privately rejected by the majority. Last, we consider a group of individuals discussing a collection of logically related topics. In particular, we identify that for topics whose logical interdependencies take on a cascade structure,disagreement in opinions can occur if individuals have competing and/or heterogeneous views on how the topics are related, i.e., the logical interdependence structure varies between individuals.展开更多
Social networks often serve as a critical medium for information dissemination, diffusion of epidemics, and spread of behavior, by shared activities or similarities be- tween individuals. Recently, we have witnessed a...Social networks often serve as a critical medium for information dissemination, diffusion of epidemics, and spread of behavior, by shared activities or similarities be- tween individuals. Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in studying social influence and spread dynamics in social networks. To date, relatively little material has been provided on a comprehensive review in this field. This brief survey addresses this issue. We present the current significant empirical studies on real social systems, including network construction methods, measures of network, and newly em- pirical results. We then provide a concise description of some related social models from both macro- and micro-level per- spectives. Due to the difficulties in combining real data and simulation data for verifying and validating real social sys- tems, we further emphasize the current research results of computational experiments. We hope this paper can provide researchers significant insights into better understanding the characteristics of personal influence and spread patterns in large-scale social systems.展开更多
基金supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) (No. DP-160104500) and Data61-CSIRO, Australiasupported in part by the European Research Council (No. ERC-CoG-771687)the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (No. NWO-vidi-14134)
文摘A fundamental aspect of society is the exchange and discussion of opinions between individuals, occurring in situations as varied as company boardrooms, elementary school classrooms and online social media. After a very brief introduction to the established results of the most fundamental opinion dynamics models, which seek to mathematically capture observed social phenomena, a brief discussion follows on several recent themes pursued by the authors building on the fundamental ideas. In the first theme, we study the way an individual′s self-confidence can develop through contributing to discussions on a sequence of topics, reaching a consensus in each case,where the consensus value to some degree reflects the contribution of that individual to the conclusion. During this process, the individuals in the network and the way they interact can change. The second theme introduces a novel discrete-time model of opinion dynamics to study how discrepancies between an individual′s expressed and private opinions can arise due to stubbornness and a pressure to conform to a social norm. It is also shown that a few extremists can create "pluralistic ignorance", where people believe there is majority support for a position but in fact the position is privately rejected by the majority. Last, we consider a group of individuals discussing a collection of logically related topics. In particular, we identify that for topics whose logical interdependencies take on a cascade structure,disagreement in opinions can occur if individuals have competing and/or heterogeneous views on how the topics are related, i.e., the logical interdependence structure varies between individuals.
文摘Social networks often serve as a critical medium for information dissemination, diffusion of epidemics, and spread of behavior, by shared activities or similarities be- tween individuals. Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in studying social influence and spread dynamics in social networks. To date, relatively little material has been provided on a comprehensive review in this field. This brief survey addresses this issue. We present the current significant empirical studies on real social systems, including network construction methods, measures of network, and newly em- pirical results. We then provide a concise description of some related social models from both macro- and micro-level per- spectives. Due to the difficulties in combining real data and simulation data for verifying and validating real social sys- tems, we further emphasize the current research results of computational experiments. We hope this paper can provide researchers significant insights into better understanding the characteristics of personal influence and spread patterns in large-scale social systems.
