Modeling Explosive Opinion Depolarization in Interdependent Topics.

Understanding the dynamics of opinion depolarization is pivotal to reducing the political divide in our society. We propose an opinion dynamics model, which we name the social compass model, for interdependent topics represented in a polar space, where zealots holding extreme opinions are less prone to change their minds. We analytically show that the phase transition from polarization to consensus, as a function of increasing social influence, is explosive if topics are not correlated.

Flocking dynamics mediated by weighted social networks.

We study the effects of animal social networks with a weighted pattern of interactions on the flocking transition exhibited by models of self-organized collective motion. We consider variations of traditional models of collective motion in which interactions between individuals are mediated by static complex weighted networks, representing patterns of social interactions. For a model representing dynamics on a one-dimensional substrate, application of a heterogeneous mean-field theory provides a phase diagram as function of the heterogeneity of the network connections and the correlations between weights and degree.