Social diffusion and global drift on networks

Enhanced ability of information gathering may intensify disagreement among groups

Today's society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people's information-gathering ability and introduced a generalized nonlocal gradient as individuals' perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the more attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today's increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.

Consensus dynamics in online collaboration systems

BACKGROUND

In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building in online collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other following their common interests and their social profiles. Specifically, we are interested in how users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as the interplay of those two factors, influence the process of consensus dynamics.

METHODS

For our study, we simulate the diffusion of opinions in collaboration systems using the well-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating an interaction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. We conduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web.

RESULTS

Our findings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, the process of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. A suitable increase of influence of user social status on their actions can in turn facilitate this process.

CONCLUSIONS

In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimal consensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriate balance between those two factors.