title: Effects of social diversity on the emergence of global consensus in opinion dynamics.
abstract: We propose a variant of the voter model by introducing the social diversity in the evolution process. Each individual is assigned a weight that is proportional to the power of its degree, where the power exponent alpha is an adjustable parameter that controls the level of diversity among individuals in the network. At each time step, a pair of connected individuals, say i and j , are randomly selected to update their opinions. The probability p(i) of choosing is opinion as their common opinion is proportional to i s weight. We consider the scale-free topology and concentrate on the efficiency of reaching the final consensus, which is significant in characterizing the self-organized systems. Interestingly, it is found that there exists an optimal value of alpha, leading to the shortest consensus time. This phenomenon indicates that, although a strong influence of high-degree individuals is helpful for quick consensus achievement, over strong influence inhibits the convergence process. Other quantities, such as the probability of an individual's initial opinion becomes the final opinion as a function of degree, the evolution of the number of opinion clusters, as well as the relationship between average consensus time and the network size, are also studied. Our results are helpful for better understanding the role of degree heterogeneity of the individuals in the opinion dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. hxyang@mail.ustc.edu.cn
authors.forename: Han-Xin
authors.initials: HX
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Zhi-Xi
authors.initials: ZX
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Changsong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Bing-Hong
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D038622:Internationality; D008954:Models, Biological; D011157:Population Dynamics; D011639:Public Opinion; D012919:Social Behavior