Role of inflexible minorities in the evolution of alcohol consumption

TL;DR

This study investigates how inflexible individuals influence the evolution of alcohol consumption behaviors, revealing that their presence prevents certain stable states and makes the model more realistic by eliminating absorbing phases.

Contribution

It introduces a contagion model with inflexible agents, showing how they alter phase transitions and stabilize the population's drinking behavior dynamics.

Findings

Inflexible agents eliminate certain absorbing states.

Presence of both types of inflexibles removes all absorbing states.

Inflexibles suppress phase transitions to absorbing states.

Abstract

In this work we study a simple contagion model for drinking behavior evolution, but including the presence of inflexible or zealot agents, i.e., individuals that never change their behavior (never drink or always drink a lot). We analyze the impact of such special agents in the evolution of drinking behavior in the population. Our analytical and numerical results indicate that the presence of only one class of inflexible agents destroys one of the two possible absorbing phases that are observed in the model without such inflexibles. In the presence of the both kinds of inflexible agents simultaneously, there are no absorbing states anymore. Since absorbing states are collective macroscopic states with the presence of only one kind of individuals in the population, we argue that the inclusion of inflexible agents in the population makes the model more realistic. Furthermore, the presence of inflexible agents are similar to the introduction of quenched disorder in the model, and here we observe the suppression of a nonequilibrium phase transition to absorbing states, which had not been reported before.