Characterizing the process of reaching consensus for social systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new characterization of how social systems reach consensus, emphasizing the role of communicators and providing a model to unify systems under consensus conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel theorem linking communicators to consensus achievement and offers a model illustrating this process explicitly.

Findings

Communicators are necessary and sufficient for consensus.

A model demonstrates how systems unify through communicators.

Consensus is guaranteed after merging systems with communicators.

Abstract

A novel way of characterizing the process of reaching consensus for a social system is given. The foundation of the characterization is based on the theorem which states that the sufficient and necessary condition for a system to reach the state of consensus is the occurrence of communicators, defined as the units of the system that can directly communicate with all the others simultaneously. A model is proposed to illustrate the characterization explicitly. The existence of communicators provides an efficient way for unifying two systems that a state of consensus is guaranteed after the mergence.