Vector opinion dynamics: An extended model for consensus in social networks

Most people hold a variety of opinions on different topics ranging from sports, entertainment, spiritual beliefs to moral principles. These can be based on a personal reflection and evaluation or on their interactions with others. How do we influence others in our social network and how do they influence us and how do we reach consensus? In this paper, we present our investigations based on the use of multiple opinions (a vector of opinions) that should be considered to determine consensus in a society. We have extended Deffuant model and have tested our model on top of two well-known network topologies the Barabasi-Albert network and the Erdos-Renyi network. We have implemented a two phase filtering process determining the consensus.Unpublished[1] Deffuant, G., D. Neau, et al. (2001). "Mixing beliefs among interacting agents.", Advances in Complex Systems 3: 87-98. [2] Forgas, J. P. and K. D. Williams (2001). Social influence :direct and indirect processes. Philadelphia, Psychology Press. [3] Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence. Milton Keynes [England], Open University Press. [4] Lecy, J. and S. Sonne (2006). "Towards a Dynamic Network Model of Influence and Consensus". Accessed fromhttp://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ssonne/Final_Paper_III.doc, 23rd September 2007. [5] Dowd, M. (2002). "The Politics of Polarization." The Washington Post, Last accessed on 25th October 2007 from http://www.vianovo.com/english/news/fromourdesk/2002_1216.htm [6] Tutte, W. T. (2001). Graph theory, Cambridge University Press New York. [7] Bollobás, B. (2001). Random Graphs, Cambridge University Press. [8] Barabási, A. L. and R. Albert (1999). "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks”, Science 286(5439): 509. [9] Mitchell, M.: Complex systems: Network thinking. Artificial Intelligence 170(18) (2006) 1194–1212 [10] Albert, R., Barabasi, A.L.: Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics 74 (2002) 47–97 [11] Albert, R., Jeong, H., Barabasi, A.L.: Error and attack tolerance of complex networks. Nature 406(6794) (July 2000) 378–382 [12] Bollob´as, B., Riordan, O.: The diameter of a scale-free random graph. Combinatorica 24(1) (January 2004) 5–34 [13] B. T. R. Savarimuthu, S. Cranefield, M. Purvis, and M. Purvis. Role model based mechanism for norm emergence in artificial agent societies. In Proceeding of the AAMAS 2007 workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN), pages 1–12, 2007