Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Belief System Dynamics under Logic Constraints

Angelia Nedić, Alex Olshevsky, César A. Uribe
2019 Scientific Reports  
Opinion formation cannot be modeled solely as an ideological deduction from a set of principles; rather, repeated social interactions and logic constraints among statements are consequential in the construct of belief systems. We address three basic questions in the analysis of social opinion dynamics: (i) Will a belief system converge? (ii) How long does it take to converge? (iii) Where does it converge? We provide graph-theoretic answers to these questions for a model of opinion dynamics of a
more » ... belief system with logic constraints. Our results make plain the implicit dependence of the convergence properties of a belief system on the underlying social network and on the set of logic constraints that relate beliefs on different statements. Moreover, we provide an explicit analysis of a variety of commonly used large-scale network models.
doi:10.1038/s41598-019-45076-4 pmid:31221988 pmcid:PMC6586829 fatcat:p5wqdl5tmffjzldpkqyubzusmy