Opinion dynamics with mobile agents: Contrarian effects by spatial correlations

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation in a group of mobile agents with noisy perceptions. Two models are applied, the 2-state Galam opinion dynamics model with contrarians and an urn model of collective decision-making. It is shown that models built on the well-mixed assumption fail to represent the dynamics of a simple scenario. The challenge of accounting for correlations in the agents' spatial distribution is overcome by different heuristics and supported by empirical investigations. We present a concise, simple 1-dimensional macroscopic modeling approach that can be tuned to correctly model spatial correlations.