Conformity and External Influence: Opinion Modeling on Various Lattices
Maciej Wołoszyn1 ✉️ 1AGH University of Krakow, Poland
Cite as: Wołoszyn, M. (2025, May). Conformity and External Influence: Opinion Modeling on Various Lattices. In SCS 2025, 2nd International Conference on Social Contexts of Science (p. 26). Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland.
Abstract
Opinion modelling can be viewed as a tool to predict how the social opinion changes in time for a given network of agents and their relations. However, it can be also seen as a more basic and general technique used to understand the dynamics of such processes. The latter problem leads to the question about the influence of the structure of relations: how strong is the effect of increasing the number of relations, and how it is realized? How the social systems react to the changes in the network of relations, if different levels of conformity (strength of convincing other agents) and external influence (for example, caused by mass media) are considered? Does that help or prevent reaching a consensus? The above mentioned questions have been subject of many important works in the field of sociophysics, a field of science which applies computer simulations, analytical methods and other tools borrowed mainly from statistical physics to the description of social systems. In the current work, those questions are addressed with Monte Carlo simulations performed on various regular lattices and on their modified versions. The considered modifications include increasing or decreasing the number of relations between the agents. As should be expected, the results [1] indicate that stronger bonds and openness to discussion and argumentation generally help in reaching a consensus, and quantitative estimations of the levels of those parameters will be presented. Moreover, the external influence becomes a destructive factor at different levels depending on the lattice, and this influence is also discussed in terms of its strength. Finally, the interplay between those two factors will be considered to find the conditions for transition between polarization of opinions and consensus.
[1] M.Wołoszyn, Conformity and Mass Media Influence in the Sznajd Model on Regular Lattices, Entropy 26 (2024) 307
Keywords
Sociophysics, Opinion modelling, Opinion dynamics, Sznajd model, Polarization, Consensus
Current status of the research is: Published, available online
Potential collaboration with Authors
researching and expanding opinion models, models of social balance (Heider balance), and other similar models; we are looking for exchange of experiences, access to real-world data, cooperation in software development and offer sharing our experiences, software, and capability of conducting simulations at a large supercomputing centre