Theory of collective opinion shifts: from smooth trends to abrupt swings

By Q. Michard, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. 2005

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. We unveil collective effects induced by imitation and social pressure by analyzing data from three different sources: birth rates, sales of cell phones and the drop of applause in concert halls. We interpret our results within the framework of the Random Field Ising Model, which is a threshold model for collective decisions accounting both for agent heterogeneity and social imitation. Changes of opinion can occur either abruptly or continuously, depending on the importance of herding effects. The main prediction of the model is a scaling relation between the height h of the speed of variation peak and its width w of the form h ∼w-κ, with κ= 2/3 for well connected populations. Our three sets of data are compatible with such a prediction, with κ≈0.62 for birth rates, κ≈0.71 for cell phones and κ≈0.64 for clapping. In this last case, we in fact observe that some clapping samples end discontinuously (w=0), as predicted by the model for strong enough imitation.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b358a30820fcf3aa70b9486255e19dead0a8234

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Citations in the corpus

A random walk in the literature on criminality: A partial and critical view on some statistical analyses and modelling approaches (2010, unknown): “Social interactions may be responsible for bandwagon effects [50, 96], nonmonotonic demand curves in economy [49,83,87], hysteresis in the dynamical behaviours [82], and more generally, positive feedback loops in the dynamics of the social system.”
The Physics of Communicability in Complex Networks (2011, background): “One illustrative example of macroscopic (global) correlation is the cell-phone adoption during the 1990s; it was a “contagion” effect that induced many to buy phones simply because their friends and colleagues were buying them, which then propagated in a correlated way across Europe (Michard and Bou”
Crises and Collective Socio-Economic Phenomena: Simple Models and Challenges (2012, methodology): “The way h and w are extracted from data is detailed in [48].”
Statistical physics of social dynamics (2007, background): “In (Michard and Bouchaud, 2005) it was suggested that extreme events like booms of products/fashions, financial crashes, crowd panic, etc., are determined by a combination of effects, including the personal atti- 24 tude of the agents, the public information, which affects all agents, and social…”