On the emergence of an `intention field' for socially cohesive agents

Authored by Christian Borghesi, Pablo Jensen

Date Published: 2014-03

DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/2014/03/p03010

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

We argue that when a social convergence mechanism exists and is strong enough, one should expect the emergence of a well-defined `field', i.e. a slowly evolving, local quantity around which individual attributes fluctuate in a finite range. This condensation phenomenon is well illustrated by the Deffuant-Weisbuch opinion model for which we provide a natural extension to allow for spatial heterogeneities. We show analytically and numerically that the resulting dynamics of the emergent field is a noisy diffusion equation that has a slow dynamics. This random diffusion equation reproduces the long-ranged, logarithmic decrease of the correlation of spatial voting pat terns empirically found in Borghesi and Bouchaud (2010 Eur. Phys. J. B 75 395) and Borghesi el al (2012 PLoS One 7 e36289). Interestingly enough, we find that When the social cohesion mechanism becomes too weak, cultural cohesion breaks down completely. in the sense that the distribution of intentions/opinions becomes infinitely broad. No emerging field exists in this case. All these analytical findings are confirmed by numerical simulations of an agent-based model.

Tags

critical phenomena of socio-economic systems it tot acting agent models