Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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AGjDPG: Arbeitsgruppe junge DPG

AGjDPG 1: Tutorial: Evolutionary Dynamics and Applications to Biology, Social and Economic Systems

AGjDPG 1.2: Tutorial

Sunday, March 6, 2016, 16:50–17:40, H16

Voter models of social opinion formation. — •Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron — Department of Theoretical Physics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wybrzeze Wyspianskiego 27, 50-370 Wroclaw

Among many different subjects, opinion dynamics is one of the most studied in the field of sociophysics. In my opinion there are at least two important reasons why physicists study this topic. The first motivation comes from social sciences and can be described as a temptation to build a bridge between the micro and macro levels in describing social systems. Traditionally, there are two main disciplines that study social behavior - sociology and social psychology. Although the subject of the study is the same for both disciplines, the usually taken approach is very different. Sociologists study social systems from the level of the social group, whereas social psychologists concentrate on the level of the individual. From the physicist's point of view this is similar to the relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics. This analogy raises the challenge to describe and understand the collective behavior of social systems (sociology) from the level of interpersonal interactions (social psychology). The second motivation to deal with opinion dynamics is related to the development of non-equilibrium statistical physics, because models of opinion dynamics are often very interesting from the theoretical point of view. A good example of such an interesting model is a broad class of voter models, including linear voter model and nonlinear q-voter model introduced in along with its modifications.