Inf. Sci. | 2021
Exchange, adopt, evolve: Modeling the spreading of opinions through cognition and interaction in a social network
Abstract
Abstract The formation of public opinions is a complex phenomenon that revolves around the aggregation of individuals’ beliefs. To accurately capture this phenomenon, one needs to build links from individualistic experiences to personal beliefs, which evolve in a social space through information exchange and belief revision. Despite many efforts to model opinion dynamics, the role of personal experiences and beliefs has often been overlooked. In this paper, we address this issue and propose an agent-based model in a social network. We explicitly model belief acquisition as a learning process from experiences that take the form of local data sets. Agents interact through a social network and update their beliefs based on how accurately the belief reflects experiences. Through iterations of interactions, the agents are able to arrive at a unified belief. We then focus on the accuracy of the personal beliefs during their evolution and the impact of the social network structure. On a micro-level, we investigate positional attributes such as the centrality of nodes that affect belief accuracy. On a macro-level, we investigate structural features that affect the overall performance. We then investigate a method to intervene in opinion formation through expert agents. Experiments are performed on real-world and synthetic data sets, which validate a number of important structural insights.