Active speed role in opinion formation of interacting moving agents

G. TERRANOVA; J.A. REVELLI; G. J. SIBONA

EUROPHYSICS LETTERS

EPL ASSOCIATION

Lugar: Bologna; Año: 2014 vol. 105 p. 30007 - 30013

0295-5075

We propose a general non-linear analytical framework to study the evolution of theopinion state of a population of moving individuals. This novel scheme allows us to study a broadrange of social phenomena, like, for example, the influence of agent interaction dynamics in theopinion formation or the inclusion of different individual?s idiosyncrasies. We consider societiescomposed by agents who adopt one of the n possible opinions or internal states. The opinionstate may only be modified while the agent keeps contact with another one. In general, thisframework could be solved numerically, and, for some special perturbative cases, it is possibleto find analytical steady states. In order to check our scheme for different social conventions,we implement computational simulations of an ensemble of self-propelled agents, finding a goodagreement between theory and simulation results. We found, for slow society kinetics in all thecases studied, that there exist a shift of the opinion populations towards the moderate opinionstates. This suggest that active speed can be understood as a parameter measuring the socialtemperature of the community.