Opinion Dissemination Computational Model

The dissemination of opinions is a very important phenomenon in modern societies because it shapes politics, policies and then guides the evolution of societies in the future. The scheme is very simple: an opinion is transmitted by a leader to other people in his (her) neighborhood. People can be convinced or not and so, in turn, they convey their updated opinion (or their previous one) to their neighbors. This paper presents a computational framework based on a set binary local rules that have the capability to model the transmission of opinion between neighbors. Several neighborhood types are considered, such as 4- and 8-neighbours and knight (chess) neighbors. Different behavioral patterns are analyzed in relation to rule type, neighborhood type, and leader type.