Opinion interaction network: opinion dynamics in social networks with heterogeneous relationships

Recent empirical studies have discovered that many social networks have heterogeneous relationships, which are signed and weighted relationships between individual nodes. To explore the pattern of opinion dynamics in diverse social networks with heterogeneous relationships, we set up a general agent-based simulation framework named opinion interaction network (OIN), and propose a novel model of opinion dynamics, in which the influence of agents depends on their heterogeneous relationships. Then, by conducting a series of simulations based on OIN, we find that the opinions at steady state depend on the degree of social harmoniousness and average connectivity, and the similar pattern can be observed in the network of Erdös_Rényi, small world and scale free, which illustrates that the topological properties such as short path length, high clustering, and heterogeneous degrees have few effects on opinion dynamics with heterogeneous relationships.

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