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The division of a social group into subgroups with opposing opinions, which we refer to as opinion disparity, is a prevalent phenomenon in society. This phenomenon has been modeled by including mechanisms such as opinion homophily, bounded confidence interactions, and social reinforcement mechanisms. In this paper, we study a complementary mechanism for the formation of opinion disparity based on higher-order interactions, i.e., simultaneous interactions between multiple agents. We present an extension of the planted partition model for uniform hypergraphs as a simple model of community structure, and we consider the hypergraph Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model on a hypergraph with two communities where the binary ideology can spread via links (pairwise interactions) and triangles (three-way interactions). We approximate this contagion process with a mean-field model and find that for strong enough community structure, the two communities can hold very different average opinions. We determine the regimes of structural and infectious parameters for which this opinion disparity can exist, and we find that the existence of these disparities is much more sensitive to the triangle community structure than to the link community structure. We show that the existence and type of opinion disparities are extremely sensitive to differences in the sizes of the two communities.
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Divide-and-Conquer Policy in the Naming Game
The naming game (NG) is a classic model for studying the emergence and evolution of language within a population. In this article, we extend the traditional NG model to encompass multiple committed opinions and investigate the system dynamics on the complete graph with an arbitrarily large population and random networks of finite size. For the fully connected complete graph, the homogeneous mixing condition enables us to use mean-field theory to analyze the opinion evolution of the system. However, when the number of opinions increases, the number of variables describing the system grows exponentially. To mitigate this, we focus on a special scenario where the largest group of committed agents compete with a motley of committed groups, each of which is smaller than the largest one, while initially, most of uncommitted agents hold one unique opinion. This scenario is chosen for its recurrence in diverse societies and its potential for complexity reduction by unifying agents from smaller committed groups into one category. Our investigation reveals that when the size of the largest committed group reaches the critical threshold, most of uncommitted agents change their beliefs to this opinion, triggering a phase transition. Further, we derive the general formula for the multiopinion evolution using a recursive approach, enabling investigation into any scenario. Finally, we employ agent-based simulations to reveal the opinion evolution and dominance transition in random graphs. Our results provide insights into the conditions under which the dominant opinion emerges in a population and the factors that influence these conditions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2214216
- PAR ID:
- 10523351
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
- ISSN:
- 2373-7476
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Divide-and-conquer mean-field theory naming game (NG) tipping point.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2024.3417184
