Consensus emerging from the bottom-up: the role of cognitive variables in opinion dynamics

Frontiers in Physics

Giardini, Francesca¹  Conte, Rosaria¹  Vilone, Daniele¹ 

[1] National Research Council (CNR),, Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Via Palestro 32, Rome, 00185, Italy

关键词: opinion dynamics;    Cognitive Modeling;    social influence;    Agent-based modeling;    Sociophysics;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fphy.2015.00064

学科分类：物理（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The study of opinions − e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society − by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology and complexity science. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories, several key questions still remain unanswered. The aim of this paper is to provide a cognitively grounded computational model of opinions in which they are described as mental representations and defined in terms of distinctive mental features. We also define how these representations change dynamically through different processes, describing the interplay between mental and social dynamics of opinions. We present two versions of the model, one with discrete opinions (voter model-like), and one with continuous ones (Deffuant-like). By means of numerical simulations, we compare the behaviour of our cognitive model with the classical sociophysical models, and we identify interesting differences in the dynamics of consensus for each of the models considered.

【 授权许可】

CC BY