Sociology: A Stochastic Model for the Formation of Public Opinion

Abstract

Intuitively it is rather obvious that formation of public opinion, actions of social groups, etc., are of a cooperative nature. On the other hand it appears extremely difficult if not impossible to put such phenomena on a rigorous basis because the actions of individuals are determined by quite a number of very often unknown causes. On the other hand, within the spirit of this book, we have seen that in systems with many subsystems there exist at least two levels of description: One analysing the individual system and its interaction with its surrounding, and the other one describing the statistical behavior using macroscopic variables. It is on this level that a quantitative description of interacting social groups becomes possible.