Moderates and consensus formation in the Deffuant model

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Miranda, Ruan dos Santos Vieira
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Consensus formation; Deffuant model; Dinâmica de opinião; Extremistas; Extremists; Formação de consenso; Modelo de Deffuant; Moderados; Moderates; Opinion dynamics
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/45/45133/tde-17122024-112820/

Understanding the conditions for consensus formation is a pivotal topic in social, behavioral, economic, and other sciences. Opinion dynamics, particularly in the mathematical sense, provides valuable insights into this phenomenon. The Deffuant model describes consensus formation where pairs of agents interact only if their opinions differ by no more than a given threshold, leading to an approximation of their beliefs. Traditionally, this model is defined on a graph G=(Z, E) with E=\\{(x,x+1):x\\in Z\\} and initial opinions uniformly distributed on the unit interval. The critical threshold value for consensus in this setup is 1/2. In our research, we extend the model to Z^2 and consider opinions in one and two dimensions. We explore various initial distributions to assess the role of moderates, agents with views inside the opinion spectrum, in addition to the extremists, in achieving consensus. We aim to determine the critical quantity of moderates necessary for consensus formation. Numerical evidence suggests that in populations with a high tolerance to interact, even a small number of moderates can significantly impact the speed of achieving consensus.