On the role of evangelism in consensus formation: a simulation approach
Authored by Ishank Sharma, Bishwaraj Chourasia, Abhishek Bhatia, Rinkaj Goyal
Date Published: 2016
DOI: 10.1186/s40294-016-0029-4
Sponsors:
No sponsors listed
Platforms:
NetLogo
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Flow charts
Pseudocode
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Purpose: Opinions continuously evolve in society. While conservative
ideas may get replaced by a new one, some views remain immutable.
Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have witnessed lots of
attention in the last decade due to its widespread applicability in the
diverse domain of science and technology. We analyse these scenarios in
which interactions at the micro level results in the changes in opinions
at the macro level in a population of predefined ideological groups.
Methods: We use the Bass model, otherwise well known for understanding
innovation diffusion phenomena, to compute adoption probabilities of
three opinion states-zealot, extremists and moderates. Thereafter, we
employ cellular automata to explore the emergence of opinions through
local and overlapped interactions between agents (people). NetLogo
environment has been used to develop an agent-based model, simulating
different ideological scenarios.
Results: Simulation results validate a critical proportion of committed
individuals as a plausible basis for ideological shifts in societies.
The analysis elucidates upon the role of moderates in the population and
emergence of varying opinions. The results further delineate the role of
evangelism through social and non-social methods in propagating views.
Conclusion: The results obtained from these simulations endorse the
conclusions reported in previous studies regarding the role of a
critical zealot population, and the preponderance of non-social
influence. We, however, use two-phase opinion model with different
experimental settings. Additionally, we examine global observable, such
as entropy of the system to reveal common patterns of adoption in the
views and evenness of population after reaching a consensus.
Tags
Diversity
Model
Opinion
Cellular-automata
Evenness