Critical phenomena in the spreading of opinion consensus and disagreement

Abstract

We consider a class of models of opinion formation where the dissemination of individual opinions occurs through the spreading of local consensus and disagreement. We study the emergence of full collective consensus or maximal disagreement in one- and two- dimensional arrays. In both cases, the probability of reaching full consensus exhibits well-defined scaling properties as a function of the system size. Two-dimensional systems, in particular, possess nontrivial exponents and critical points. The dynamical rules of our models, which emphasize the interaction between small groups of agents, should be considered as complementary to the imitation mechanisms of traditional opinion dynamics.