Social Structure and Opinion Formation Export

@misc{citeulike:644, abstract = {We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which in- dividuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in the long time limit. This co-existence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, author = {Wu, Fang and Huberman, Bernardo A.}, citeulike-article-id = {644}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0407252}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0407252}, day = {20}, eprint = {cond-mat/0407252}, keywords = {behave, collaborate, group, idea, percolate, social, structure, tag}, month = {July}, posted-at = {2006-05-27 19:56:20}, priority = {3}, title = {Social Structure and Opinion Formation}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0407252}, year = {2004} }

TY - ELEC ID - citeulike:644 L3 - citeulike-article-id:644 N2 - We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which in- dividuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in the long time limit. This co-existence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks. TI - Social Structure and Opinion Formation KW - behave KW - collaborate KW - group KW - idea KW - percolate KW - social KW - structure KW - tag AU - Wu, Fang AU - Huberman, Bernardo PY - 2004/07/20/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0407252 ER -