The Model and Analysis of Conformity in Opinion Formation

摘要

The formation of public opinion has been focused by many scholars recently; a lot of models have been proposed to verify the process of formation. Many models have noticed that individuals can exchange their opinions and many scholars make their own rule of how individuals change their opinions. After year 2000, some classic models and their variants output some useful result, but there is no paper talk about group size and its influence. This paper presents a model from the social psychology points of view. The model considers both parts (positive opinions and negative opinions) of some connected people. We simulated the formation process using the proposed model, results show that the model is useful for explaining how group/herd mentality causes prevalence and how conformity lead to balance.