Author
Listed:
- F. GARGIULO
(IRSTEA, Laboratoire d'Ingenierie pour les Systèmes Complexes, BP 50085, 63172 Aubiere Cedex, France)
- S. HUET
(IRSTEA, Laboratoire d'Ingenierie pour les Systèmes Complexes, BP 50085, 63172 Aubiere Cedex, France)
Abstract
Can the discussions about new issues challenge the organization of a society? That is, the question we tried to answer with a very simple model considering a society where individuals are organized into groups. An individual discuss its opinion on this new issue following the rule of the bounded confidence model implying that an individual influences and is influenced when it is sufficiently open-minded. One of the main ingredients of the model is the groups that both influence the behavior of the individual and characterize the social network topology. Individuals choose the group membership according to their opinion. Starting from an initial homogeneous group size distribution, four different prototypical regimes can be reproduced by the model, depending on the individual open-mindedness: From a high heterogeneity condition, with one or two largely major groups, to an invariant situation of homogeneity. The heterogeneity is explained by the dynamics of individuals. In this paper, we extend the studies of a previous work on the argument, deepening the analysis on the internal structure of the groups and on the dynamical process itself. To do this, we analyze indicators related to the stability of the obtained virtual society. We found that the dynamics of groups is not stable when open-mindedness is small, even if the dynamics of opinions reaches equilibrium. On the other side, for larger values of the open-mindedness, both the opinion and the group dynamics stabilize. Thus, our study shows that the introduction of a new topic of discussion in a society can strongly challenge group structures, both concerning their stability and their size.
Suggested Citation
F. Gargiulo & S. Huet, 2012.
"New Discussions Challenge The Organization Of Societies,"
Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(07), pages 1-17.
Handle:
RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:15:y:2012:i:07:n:s0219525912500336
DOI: 10.1142/S0219525912500336
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:15:y:2012:i:07:n:s0219525912500336. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/acs.shtml .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.