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Updated: Jul 13, 2025
08:12
A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
2.5K
Opinion disparity in hypergraphs with community structure.
Nicholas W Landry1,2,3, Juan G Restrepo3
1Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont 05405, USA.
Physical Review. E
|October 18, 2023
Summary
Higher-order social interactions, like group discussions, can create opposing opinions within communities. This opinion disparity is sensitive to community structure and size differences.
Area of Science:
- Sociophysics
- Network Science
- Computational Social Science
Background:
- Opinion disparity, the division of social groups into opposing subgroups, is a common societal phenomenon.
- Existing models often focus on pairwise interactions, homophily, and reinforcement mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of higher-order interactions (simultaneous multi-agent interactions) in forming opinion disparity.
- To introduce a novel model based on higher-order interactions within community structures.
Main Methods:
- Extension of the planted partition model for uniform hypergraphs to represent community structure.
- Application of the hypergraph Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model to study ideology spread via links and triangles.
- Approximation of the contagion process using a mean-field model.
Main Results:
- Strong community structures can lead to significant differences in average opinions between subgroups.
- Opinion disparity is more sensitive to triangle (three-way) interactions than link (pairwise) interactions.
- The existence and nature of opinion disparities are highly dependent on the relative sizes of the communities.
Conclusions:
- Higher-order interactions, particularly triangles, play a crucial role in fostering opinion disparity within social networks.
- Community structure and size are critical factors influencing the emergence and stability of opposing opinions.
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