Reflection vs Persuation. Modeling opinión formation in a society

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

Carlos Paz

Workshop; XIII Latin American Workshop on non-linear Phenomena: LAWNP?13; 2013

FaMAF-UNC

We study the competition between propaganda influence and opinion exchange among individuals to set the majority opinion of a society. We also analyze the influence of agent dynamics and society density and mobility in the opinion formation. We propose a general non linear analytical framework which establishes the evolution of the opinion of the population in a closed 2D system. We obtain exact analytical results in some special cases. We implement a simple self-propelled agent- model where each agent adopts one of the n possible opinions or states. Those individual states may change while the agents keep contact with other ones (change by interaction/persuasion) during a finite time or when they are alone (change by reflection or by mass media). Molecular dynamics-type simulations were performed in order to check theoretical results (finding an excellent agreement with them); and to find new behaviors in the system. Finally we present the study of more interesting ?real cases?, where we choose some particular situations found in certain societies, analyzing the opinion behavior in those cases