Opinion formation in time-varying social networks: The case of the naming game

TL;DR

This paper explores how the dynamics of opinion formation via the naming game are affected by the temporal variations of social networks, revealing that community structure and synchronization influence consensus and metastability.

Contribution

It provides a computational analysis of the naming game on real, time-varying social networks, highlighting the effects of community structure and temporal synchronization on opinion dynamics.

Findings

Community structure hinders global agreement, leading to metastability.

Fast network variations affect the emergent properties of the naming game.

Synchronization with network evolution reveals new opinion formation behaviors.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of the naming game as an opinion formation model on time-varying social networks. This agent-based model captures the essential features of the agreement dynamics by means of a memory-based negotiation process. Our study focuses on the impact of time-varying properties of the social network of the agents on the naming game dynamics. In particular, we perform a computational exploration of this model using simulations on top of real networks. We investigate the outcomes of the dynamics on two different types of time-varying data - (i) the networks vary on a day-to-day basis and (ii) the networks vary within very short intervals of time (20 seconds). In the first case, 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 leading to metastability. In the second case, we investigate the evolution of the naming game in perfect synchronization with the time evolution of the underlying social network shedding new light on the traditional emergent properties of the game that differ largely from what has been reported in the existing literature.