The effects of conformity-driven teaching ability on opinion consensus

School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications - Beijing 100876, PRC

^(a) qldai@bupt.edu.cn

Received: 30 June 2018
Accepted: 3 August 2018

Abstract

Opinion dynamics based on evolutionary game provides a new theoretical method to investigate opinion consensus. Yang (EPL, 115 (2016) 40007) proposed a concise model to address this issue. By introducing game theory into opinion dynamics, the benefits (costs) caused by agreement (disagreement) during the evolution of opinions can be considered conveniently. Motivated by this work, we introduce conformity-driven teaching ability into the opinion dynamics based on evolutionary game. In the model, we use a sensitive factor H to characterize the dependence of the teaching ability on the conformity of individuals. The results show that the consensus time could be shortened by small H, which corresponds to the teaching ability strongly depending on the conformity. Moreover, there exists a threshold, H_th, for achieving the shortest consensus time. When H is below H_th, the consensus time is insensitive to the variation of H and remains at the minimum. However, once H exceeds H_th, the consensus time increases significantly with the increase of H. Furthermore, we provide a microscopic explanation for the results by monitoring the opinion clusters during the evolution. Besides, we study the roles of leaders in the opinion dynamics and find that the leaders holding the same opinion could effectively lead to the consensus on that opinion.