Opinion formation dynamics under the combined influences of majority and experts

Opinion formation modelling is still poorly understood due to the hardness and complexity of the abstraction of human behaviours under the presence of various types of social influences. Two such influences that shape the opinion formation process are: (i) the expert effect originated from the presence of experts in a social group and (ii) the majority effect caused by the presence of a large group of people sharing similar opinions. In real life when these two effects contradict each other, they force public opinions towards their respective directions. Existing models employed the concept of confidence levels associated with the opinions to model the expert effect. However, they ignored the majority effect explicitly, and thereby failed to capture the combined impact of these two influences on opinion evolution. Our model explicitly introduces the majority effect through the use of a concept called opinion consistency, and captures the opinion dynamics under the combined influence of majority supported opinions as well as experts’ opinions. Simulation results show that our model properly captures the consensus, polarization and fragmentation properties of public opinion and reveals the impact of the aforementioned effects. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015