Influence of temporal aspects and age-correlations on the process of opinion formation based on Polish contact survey

TL;DR

This study investigates how temporal contact patterns and age-related homophily influence opinion formation dynamics in social networks, revealing that real contact structures affect susceptibility and critical temperature in Ising-based models.

Contribution

It introduces empirical contact data into an Ising-based opinion model, highlighting the impact of age correlations and contact durations on opinion dynamics.

Findings

Real contact structures increase susceptibility to external influence.

Age homophily affects the speed of opinion formation at low social temperatures.

Cross interactions between contact frequency and duration significantly raise the critical temperature.

Abstract

On the basis of the experimental data concerning interactions between humans the process of Ising-based model of opinion formation in a social network was investigated. In the paper the data concerning human social activity, i.e. frequency and duration time of interpersonal interactions as well as age correlations - homophily are presented in comparison to base line homogeneous, static and uniform mixing. It is known from previous studies that number of contact and average age of nearest neighbors are highly correlated with age of an individual. Such real, assortative patterns usually speed up processes (like epidemic spread) on the networks, but here it only plays a role for small social temperature values (by reducing `freezing by heating' effect). A real structure of contacts affects processes in many various studies in different way, however here it causes stronger (dynamic) and smoother (durations) susceptibility on external field. Moreover, our research shows that the cross interactions between contact frequency and its duration impose the significant increase in critical temperature.