The roles of environmental noises and opinion leaders in emergency

Abstract

This paper proposes a dominant-submissive agent model on bounded confidence opinion dynamics under an emergency environment. In the proposed model, environmental noises and opinion leaders are involved in the collective opinion formation. A series of computer simulations demonstrate that environmental noises have a great impact on the collective opinion evolution. The interactions among individuals are strengthened as the variances of the environmental noises increase, and then a global group behavior emerge with a higher probability. On the other hand, the influence of opinion leaders on the collective opinion dynamics is limited. Firstly, when the fraction of opinion leaders is fixed in the social network, the number of agents following the opinion leaders decreases as the variance of the environmental noise exceeds a certain threshold. Secondly, the number of agents following the opinion leaders does not change obviously as the fraction of opinion leaders increases under a constant noisy environment. © Springer International Publishing 2013.