Minority opinion spreading in random geometry

By Serge Galam. 2002

540 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract:The dynamics of spreading of the minority opinion in public debates (a reform proposal, a behavior change, a military retaliation) is studied using a diffusion reaction model. People move by discrete step on a landscape of random geometry shaped by social life (offices, houses, bars, and restaurants). A perfect world is considered with no advantage to the minority. A one person-one argument principle is applied to determine locally individual mind changes. In case of equality, a collective doubt is evoked which in turn favors the Status Quo. Starting from a large in favor of the proposal initial majority, repeated random size local discussions are found to drive the majority reversal along the minority hostile view. Total opinion refusal is completed within few days. Recent national collective issues are revisited. The model may apply to rumor and fear propagation.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7993bf6273d618d0143b279aca246b71e8e493eb

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Citations in the corpus

Leaders in Social Networks, the Delicious Case (2011, background): “How opinions spread and form in a community is an interesting question [13,14].”
Continuous Opinion Dynamics under Bounded Confidence: A Survey (2007, background): “For Equation (1) this holds only for the mass, which is conserved for each value of ε and of course for the aggregated density, too.”
SOCIOPHYSICS: A REVIEW OF GALAM MODELS (2008, background): “Our approach to tackle the question relies on a few simple assumptions, which in turn provide a series of astonishing and powerful results [42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57].”
Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation (2013, unknown): “majority [27], or more sophisticated equations [8,22].”
Modelling dynamical processes in complex socio-technical systems (2011, background): “A first class of models is represented by behavioural models where the attributes of agents are binary variables similar to Ising spins, as in the case of the voter model 13 , the majority-rule model 14,15 and the Sznajd model 16 .”
Statistical physics of social dynamics (2007, methodology): “Since this model is just a special case of the one introduced in (Galam, 2002), we adopt this name since the beginning of the section.”
Networks beyond pairwise interactions: structure and dynamics (2020, background): “A similar class of models is the one of the majority vote models, originally proposed by Galam [501].”
Models of Social Influence: Towards the Next Frontiers (2017, background): “17 An alternative implementation of unconditional social influence inmodels with discrete opinions assumes that actors adopt the most frequent opinion amongst their network contacts, like in models implementing a local majority rule intended to describe dynamics of public debate (Galam 2002).”
Modelling rumors: the no plane Pentagon French hoax case (2002, background): “To try to put on some new light on this rather complicated phenomenon, we evoke a recent study on minority spreading in random geometries [5].”