Can Partisan Voting Lead to Truth?

TL;DR

This paper extends the voter model to include innate preferences for truth or falsehood, analyzing conditions for consensus or persistent disagreement in populations.

Contribution

It introduces a model where agents have innate preferences and studies the dynamics leading to consensus or impasse.

Findings

Conditions for reaching truth or falsehood consensus.

Scenarios leading to persistent disagreement.

Impact of innate preferences on opinion dynamics.

Abstract

We study an extension of the voter model in which each agent is endowed with an innate preference for one of two states that we term as "truth" or "falsehood". Due to interactions with neighbors, an agent that innately prefers truth can be persuaded to adopt a false opinion (and thus be discordant with its innate preference) or the agent can possess an internally concordant "true" opinion. Parallel states exist for agents that inherently prefer falsehood. We determine the conditions under which a population of such agents can ultimately reach a consensus for the truth, a consensus for falsehood, or reach an impasse where an agent tends to adopt the opinion that is in internal concordance with its innate preference so that consensus is never achieved.