Opinions, Conflicts and Consensus: Modeling Social Dynamics in a Collaborative Environment

TL;DR

This paper models social dynamics in collaborative environments like Wikipedia, showing how conflicts arise, persist, or resolve based on opinion influence and agent turnover, aligning with real-world observations.

Contribution

It introduces an extended opinion dynamics model that captures conflict emergence and resolution in collaborative settings, including effects of agent replacement.

Findings

Spontaneous symmetry breaking of consensus opinions.

Transition from consensus to perpetual conflict with agent replacement.

Qualitative agreement with Wikipedia conflict scenarios.

Abstract

Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended opinion dynamics model where agents with different opinions perform a single task to make a consensual product. As a function of the convergence parameter describing the influence of the product on the agents, the model shows spontaneous symmetry breaking of the final consensus opinion represented by the medium. In the case when agents are replaced with new ones at a certain rate, a transition from mainly consensus to a perpetual conflict occurs, which is in qualitative agreement with the scenarios observed in Wikipedia.