Correlation of Segregation and Social Networks' Majority Opinion in the Social Impact Model

Everyone may influence others to change or persist in their current opinions via face-to-face or online communications. Predicting a society's majority opinion about a specific topic is an interesting challenge with many applications, e.g., predicting social movements, political votings, economical marketing. Among the various opinion formation models, the social impact model of opinion formation is very suitable for online social networks and online communities. In this model, three main factors affect a society's overall opinion: (1) the initial population of opinion groups, (2) the noise of the individuals to be persuaded or persist on their opinions, and (3) the topology of the network of interactions among individuals. In this research, to analyze the effect of segregation on the dynamics of opinion in the model, we assumed a noise-free model. Furthermore, the network of individuals is a scale-free network, and the initial population size of both opinion groups are the same with randomly assigned opinions. Using an agent-based modeling approach, we studied how the segregation of opinion groups may affect the dynamics of opinion formation. The results reveal that there is a strong correlation between segregation and the trend of society's opinion. It could be concluded from the results that if starting from the same population size in both opinion groups, it is expected that the more segregated opinion group dominates the less one and determines the majority opinion of the society.