title: Freezing period strongly impacts the emergence of a global consensus in the voter model.
abstract: It is well known that human beings do not always change opinions or attitudes, since the duration of interaction with others usually has a significant impact on one's decision-making. Based on this observation, we introduce a freezing period into the voter model, in which the frozen individuals have a weakened opinion switching ability. We unfold the presence of an optimal freezing period, which leads to the fastest consensus, using computation simulations as well as theoretical analysis. We demonstrate that the essence of an accelerated consensus is attributed to the biased random walk of the interface between adjacent opinion clusters. The emergence of an optimal freezing period is robust against the size of the system and the number of distinct opinions. This study is instructive for understanding human collective behavior in other relevant fields.
authors.affiliation: School of Software, and Computational Social Science Laboratory, School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116621, China.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Management, School of Public Administration and Law, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: 1] Adaptive Networks and Control Laboratory, Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China [2] Centre for Chaos and Complex Networks, Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Lin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Adaptive Networks and Control Laboratory, Department of Electronic Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Physics, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR, China [2] Center for Nonlinear Studies, and the Beijing-Hong Kong-Singapore Joint Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems (Hong Kong), Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR, China [3] Institute of Computational and Theoretical Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang