title: Competing effects of social balance and influence.
abstract: We study a three-state (leftist, rightist, centrist) model that couples the dynamics of social balance with an external deradicalizing field. The mean-field analysis shows that there exists a critical value of the external field p_{c} such that for a weak external field (p<p_{c}), the system exhibits a metastable fixed point and a saddle point in addition to a stable fixed point. However, if the strength of the external field is sufficiently large (p>p_{c}), there is only one (stable) fixed point, which corresponds to an all-centrist consensus state (absorbing state). In the weak-field regime, the convergence time to the absorbing state is evaluated using the quasistationary distribution and is found to be in agreement with the results obtained by numerical simulations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sreenivasan
authors.affiliation: Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Faculty of Computer Science and Management, Wroclaw University of Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland.
authors.forename: B K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Szymanski
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.|Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Korniss