Opinion evolution in time-varying social influence networks with prejudiced agents
For researchers studying social influence dynamics, this work provides a more realistic model that accounts for time-varying networks, though it is an incremental extension of existing models.
This paper establishes new properties of the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion formation model and extends it to time-varying social influence networks, showing that disagreement can persist due to individuals' prejudices even when the network changes over time.
Investigation of social influence dynamics requires mathematical models that are "simple" enough to admit rigorous analysis, and yet sufficiently "rich" to capture salient features of social groups. Thus, the mechanism of iterative opinion pooling from (DeGroot, 1974), which can explain the generation of consensus, was elaborated in (Friedkin and Johnsen, 1999) to take into account individuals' ongoing attachments to their initial opinions, or prejudices. The "anchorage" of individuals to their prejudices may disable reaching consensus and cause disagreement in a social influence network. Further elaboration of this model may be achieved by relaxing its restrictive assumption of a time-invariant influence network. During opinion dynamics on an issue, arcs of interpersonal influence may be added or subtracted from the network, and the influence weights assigned by an individual to his/her neighbors may alter. In this paper, we establish new important properties of the (Friedkin and Johnsen, 1999) opinion formation model, and also examine its extension to time-varying social influence networks.