Compelled to do the right thing

TL;DR

This paper models opinion formation to analyze how external enforcement and educated groups influence societal compliance, finding that small interventions can effectively change collective behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining social influence, external enforcement, and educated agents to study societal compliance mechanisms.

Findings

Few monitors can induce societal change.

Small educated groups are effective under random interactions.

Network structure affects the influence of interventions.

Abstract

We use a model of opinion formation to study the consequences of some mechanisms attempting to enforce the right behaviour in a society. We start from a model where the possible choices are not equivalent (such is the case when the agents decide to comply or not with a law) and where an imitation mechanism allow the agents to change their behaviour based on the influence of a group of partners. In addition, we consider the existence of two social constraints: a) an external authority, called monitor, that imposes the correct behaviour with infinite persuasion and b) an educated group of agents that act upon their fellows but never change their own opinion, i.e., they exhibit infinite adamancy. We determine the minimum number of monitors to induce an effective change in the behaviour of the social group, and the size of the educated group that produces the same effect. Also, we compare the results for the cases of random social interactions and agents placed on a network. We have verified that a small number of monitors are enough to change the behaviour of the society. This also happens with a relatively small educated group in the case of random interactions.