Influence of an external agent in the opinion formation of a community

G. J. SIBONA; N. CLEMENTI; J. REVELLI

Cabo Frio

Workshop; Workshop on math. methods and modeling of biophysical phenomena.; 2015

IMPA

We propose a general non linear analytical framework to study the effect of mass media in an opinion formation model of a population of moving individuals. We extend the framework presented by Terranova et al. [1] allowing changes in opinion?s individuals while they are in free movement due to a reflection induced by mass media. We obtain a simple self-propelled agent- model in a closed 2D system, where each agent adopts one of the n possible opinions or states. The scheme allows us to analyze the influence of agent dynamics and society density in the opinion formation. In general the equations of the model could be solved numerically, and, for some special cases, it is possible to find analytical solutions of the steady states. In order to check our scheme for different social conventions we implement computational simulations, analyzing also two possible real cases, and finding a good agreement between theory and simulation results. We found that the effect of mass media in our model dominates the opinion state in slow dynamics communities. Additionally, for higher active speeds the rate of interactions increase, and the opinion state is determined by a competition among the reflection/propaganda rate and the persuasion rate.