Dynamics of relative agreement in multiple social contexts

Abstract

In real world scenarios, the formation of consensus is an self-organisation process by which actors have to make a joint assessment about a target subject being it a decision making problem or the formation of a collective opinion. In social simulation, models of opinion dynamics tackle the opinion formation phenomena. These models try to make an assessment, for instance, of the ideal conditions that lead an interacting group of agents to opinion consensus, polarisation or fragmentation. In this paper, we investigate the role of social relation structure in opinion dynamics using an interaction model of relative agreement. We present an agent-based model that defines social relations as multiple concomitant social networks and apply our model to an opinion dynamics model with bounded confidence. We discuss the influence of complex social network topologies where actors interact in multiple relations simultaneously. The paper builds on previous work about social space design with multiple contexts and context switching, to determine the influence of such complex social structures in a process such as opinion formation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.