Opinion formation in growing social systems
Many complex systems in social sciences can be described by complex networks. Different from regular networks and random networks, real complex networks have scale-free characteristics. Some well-known network growth models and some opinion evolution models only consider the following cases on so...
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Format: | Thesis-Master by Coursework |
Language: | English |
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Nanyang Technological University
2021
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Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/151606 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | Many complex systems in social sciences can be described by complex networks.
Different from regular networks and random networks, real complex networks have
scale-free characteristics. Some well-known network growth models and some
opinion evolution models only consider the following cases on social networks: the
opinion evolution has no influence on the network growth. But in the real world,
opinion formation may play an important role in system growth, while people may
tend to be connected to similar opinion holders and be well accepted by similar
opinion holders.
Motivated by such observations, we focused on the interaction between the
topology of complex networks and the opinion evolution in this paper. Our main
objective is to study how the topology changes when opinion plays a role in network
growth, and then to analyze whether the power law is truly universal. First of all,
we analyzed the case that the evolution of opinions takes place after the network
grows, and then we focused on the simultaneous occurrence of network growth and
opinion evolution, and verified our conclusion by changing three different
conditions. We found that when the evolution of opinion has no effect on the growth
of the system, the network topology is consistent with the original BA scale-free
network topology at the end of iteration. While the evolution of opinion plays an
important role in the growth of the system, due to the interaction between the
evolution of opinions and the network topology, the network seems to conform
more to a lognormal distribution than to the original power law distribution. |
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