Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 13: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics
SOE 13.3: Talk
Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 10:45–11:00, GÖR 226
Opinion formation on a gradient — Michael Gastner1,2,3, •Nikolitsa Markou4, Gunnar Pruessner2, and Moez Draief4 — 1Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Merchant Venturers Building, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB, UK — 2Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK — 3Institute of Technical Physics and Material Science, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary — 4Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK
Statistical physicists have become interested in models of collective social behavior such as opinion formation, where individuals change their inherently preferred opinion if their friends disagree. Real preferences often depend on regional cultural differences, which we model here as a spatial gradient g in the initial opinion. The gradient does not only add reality to the model. It can also reveal that opinion clusters in two dimensions are typically in the standard (i.e., independent) percolation universality class, thus settling a recent controversy about a non-consensus model. However, we also present a model where the width of the transition between opinions scales ∝ g−1/4, not ∝ g−4/7 as in independent percolation, and the cluster size distribution is consistent with first-order percolation.