The Naming Game in Social Networks: Community Formation and Consensus Engineering

TL;DR

This paper investigates how community structures in social networks affect the dynamics of the Naming Game, revealing that strong communities hinder global agreement and exploring strategies to promote consensus.

Contribution

It provides empirical analysis of the Naming Game on social networks with community structures and proposes strategies to enhance convergence to consensus.

Findings

Community structures hinder global agreement.

Clusters of opinions coexist indefinitely in strong community networks.

Strategies can facilitate convergence to consensus.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of the Naming Game [Baronchelli et al., (2006) J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. P06014] in empirical social networks. This stylized agent-based model captures essential features of agreement dynamics in a network of autonomous agents, corresponding to the development of shared classification schemes in a network of artificial agents or opinion spreading and social dynamics in social networks. Our study focuses on the impact that communities in the underlying social graphs have on the outcome of the agreement process. We find that networks with strong community structure hinder the system from reaching global agreement; the evolution of the Naming Game in these networks maintains clusters of coexisting opinions indefinitely. Further, we investigate agent-based network strategies to facilitate convergence to global consensus.