In this age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion polarization, the spread of propaganda... more
In this age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter,
there is rapidly growing interest in understanding
network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups
of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion
polarization, the spread of propaganda and fake news,
and the manipulation of sentiment is of interest to large
numbers of organizations and people. Whether it is the more
nefarious players such as foreign governments that are
attempting to sway elections or it is more open and above
board, such as researchers who want to make large groups
of people aware of helpful innovations, what is at stake is often significant.
In this paper, we review opinion dynamics including the extensions of many
classical models as well as some new models that deepen understanding.
For example, we look at models that track the evolution of an
individual’s power, that include noise, and that feature sequentially dependent topics, to name a few.
While the first papers studying opinion dynamics
appeared over 60 years ago, there is still a
great deal of room for innovation and exploration.
We believe that the political climate and the extraordinary
(even unprecedented) events in the sphere of politics
in the last few years will inspire new interest and new ideas.
It is our aim to help those interested researchers understand what has already
been explored in a significant portion of the field of opinion dynamics. We believe that in
doing this, it will become clear that there is still much to be done.
there is rapidly growing interest in understanding
network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups
of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion
polarization, the spread of propaganda and fake news,
and the manipulation of sentiment is of interest to large
numbers of organizations and people. Whether it is the more
nefarious players such as foreign governments that are
attempting to sway elections or it is more open and above
board, such as researchers who want to make large groups
of people aware of helpful innovations, what is at stake is often significant.
In this paper, we review opinion dynamics including the extensions of many
classical models as well as some new models that deepen understanding.
For example, we look at models that track the evolution of an
individual’s power, that include noise, and that feature sequentially dependent topics, to name a few.
While the first papers studying opinion dynamics
appeared over 60 years ago, there is still a
great deal of room for innovation and exploration.
We believe that the political climate and the extraordinary
(even unprecedented) events in the sphere of politics
in the last few years will inspire new interest and new ideas.
It is our aim to help those interested researchers understand what has already
been explored in a significant portion of the field of opinion dynamics. We believe that in
doing this, it will become clear that there is still much to be done.
