The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics

By Serge Galam, Frans Jacobs. 2007

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effect of inflexible agents on two state opinion dynamics. The model operates via repeated local updates of random grouping of agents. While floater agents do eventually flip their opinion to follow the local majority, inflexible agents keep their opinion always unchanged. It is a quenched individual opinion. In the bare model (no inflexibles), a separator at 50% drives the dynamics towards either one of two pure attractors, each associated with a full polarization along one of the opinions. The initial majority wins. The existence of inflexibles for only one of the two opinions is found to shift the separator at a lower value than 50% in favor of that side. Moreover it creates an incompressible minority around the inflexibles, one of the pure attractors becoming a mixed phase attractor. In addition above a threshold of 17% inflexibles make their side sure of winning whatever the initial conditions are. The inflexible minority wins. An equal presence of inflexibles on both sides restores the balanced dynamics with again a separator at 50% and now two mixed phase attractors on each side. Nevertheless, beyond 25% the dynamics is reversed with a unique attractor at a 50–50 stable equilibrium. But a very small advantage in inflexibles results in a decisive lowering of the separator at the advantage of the corresponding opinion. A few percent advantage does guarantee to become majority with one single attractor. The model is solved exhaustedly for groups of size 3.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b7ee2f099c3a8e3fb17f3eaff138fe479d7cf24

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Modeling Radicalization Phenomena in Heterogeneous Populations (2015, background): “Over the years sociologists and social-psychologists have contributed a good deal of work to the phenomenon [1, 4–6].”
Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation (2013, background): “Despite empirical evidence suggesting that changes of opinion and confidence are intimately related [29], and theoretical work emphasizing the important role of inflexible, highly confident agents [32,33], this aspect of social influence remains poorly understood.”
Statistical physics of social dynamics (2007, background): “…but that right after the discussion switch to the opposite opinion (Galam, 2004; Stauffer and Sá Martins, 2004); the presence of one-sided contrarians and unsettled agents (Borghesi and Galam, 2006); the presence of inflexible agents, that always stay by their side (Galam and Jacobs, 2007).”
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].”