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Homophily, Mobility and Opinion Formation

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Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11683))

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Abstract

Understanding the evolution and spread of opinions within social groups gives important insight into areas such as public elections and marketing. We are specifically interested in how psychological theories of interpersonal influence may affect how individuals change their opinion through interactions with their peers, and apply Agent Based Modelling to explore the factors that may affect the emergence of consensus.

We investigate the coevolution of opinion and location by extending the Deffuant-Weisbuch bounded confidence opinion model to include mobility inspired by the psychological theories of homophily and dissonance, where agents are attracted or repelled by their neighbours based on the agreement of their opinions. Based on wide experimentation, we characterise the time it takes to converge to a steady state and the local diversity of opinions that results, finding that homophily leads to drastic differences in the nature of consensus.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Supercomputing Wales project, which is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via Welsh Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Enas E. Alraddadi, Stuart M. Allen & Roger M. Whitaker

Authors
  1. Enas E. Alraddadi
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  2. Stuart M. Allen
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  3. Roger M. Whitaker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Enas E. Alraddadi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Ngoc Thanh Nguyen

  2. University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, Pau, France

    Richard Chbeir

  3. University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, Pau, France

    Ernesto Exposito

  4. University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, Pau, France

    Philippe Aniorté

  5. Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Bogdan Trawiński

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Alraddadi, E.E., Allen, S.M., Whitaker, R.M. (2019). Homophily, Mobility and Opinion Formation. In: Nguyen, N., Chbeir, R., Exposito, E., Aniorté, P., Trawiński, B. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11683. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28377-3_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28377-3_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28376-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28377-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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