Changing Opinions in a Changing World: A new perspective in Sociophysics
I found this article in the ArXiv today. In it, some applications and implications of recent advances in the reletively new field of sociophysics are discussed. This piece reminds me of a quote I once read of James Trefil:
"I often wonder, when reading descriptions of the scientific process by sociologists, if this is how an atom would feel if it could read a quantum mechanics textbook."Perhaps it won't be long before we learn about the behaviour of both atoms and people from the same book...
Here's what the authors have to say for themselves:
"We propose a new model of opinion formation, the Opinion Changing Rate (OCR) model. Instead of investigating the conditions that allow consensus in a world of agents with different opinions, we study under which conditions a group of agents with a different natural tendency (rate) to change opinion can find agreement. The OCR is a modified version of the Kuramoto model, one of the simplest models for synchronization in biological systems, here adapted to a social context. By means of several numerical simulations we illustrate the richness of the OCR model dynamics and its social implications."
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Posted by in linkdump @ 27 10 04 | No comments / No trackbacks
