On a Co-evolving Opinion-Leadership Model in Social Networks
This work addresses the challenge of understanding leadership dynamics in social networks for researchers in social psychology and network science, but it appears incremental as it builds on an existing framework.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling dynamic leadership emergence in social networks by proposing a co-evolving opinion-leadership model, extending the Friedkin-Johnsen framework to incorporate time-dependent susceptibility as leadership, and they established sufficient conditions for convergence to a non-trivial equilibrium.
Leadership in social groups is often a dynamic characteristic that emerges from interactions and opinion exchange. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals with strong opinions tend to gain influence, at the same time maintaining alignment with the social context is crucial for sustained leadership. Motivated by the social psychology literature that supports these empirical observations, we propose a novel dynamical system in which opinions and leadership co-evolve within a social network. Our model extends the Friedkin-Johnsen framework by making susceptibility to peer influence time-dependent, turning it into the leadership variable. Leadership strengthens when an agent holds strong yet socially aligned opinions, and declines when such alignment is lost, capturing the trade-off between conviction and social acceptance. After illustrating the emergent behavior of this complex system, we formally analyze the coupled dynamics, establishing sufficient conditions for convergence to a non-trivial equilibrium, and examining two time-scale separation regimes reflecting scenarios where opinion and leadership evolve at different speeds.