Opinion groups formation and dynamics : structures that last from non lasting entities

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended opinion model with noise to generate stable, evolving communities, addressing sociologists' challenge of creating lasting structures from transient entities.

Contribution

It develops a novel opinion model incorporating two types of noise to produce stable yet dynamic community structures.

Findings

The model produces stable, fluctuating polarized states.

Communities exhibit changing composition and mean opinions over time.

The approach demonstrates how transient agents can form lasting social structures.

Abstract

We extend simple opinion models to obtain stable but continuously evolving communities. Our scope is to meet a challenge raised by sociologists of generating "structures that last from non lasting entities". We achieve this by introducing two kinds of noise on a standard opinion model. First, agents may interact with other agents even if their opinion difference is large. Second, agents randomly change their opinion at a constant rate. We show that for a large range of control parameters, our model yields stable and fluctuating polarized states, where the composition and mean opinion of the emerging groups is fluctuating over time.