An Opinion Spreading Model Based On Individuals' Social Similarity

Public opinion has enormous influence on our life, the spread of incorrect opinion will cause panic. By study the mechanism of public opinion spreading and evolution can help us to guide the public opinion effectively. The existing opinion spreading models mainly concentrated on the impact of opinions on other opinion, and ignore the influence of environment on the opinion change. The bounded confidence model aimed to represent the effects of neighbors' opinion on individual's opinion, while the social relationship between individual and his neighbors will also affect his opinion in real life. What's more, even when the same individual communicate with different neighbors that hold the same opinion will make different choice, and the influence of individual's social character on opinion spreading cannot be ignores.Therefore, this thesis proposed an opinion evolution model considering the social relationship, the model based on classical Hegselman-Krause model(Social Similarity-based KH model, SSKH model for short). Firstly, the individual with heterogeneous social character are introduced into the opinion model, so the individuals can be regard as a node in the multi-dimensional attribute space, then the social similarity between individuals are calculated by heterogeneous social character and used to measures the social relationship base on sociology theories, the individuals of higher similarity will have stronger relationship and also more trust each other's, and vice versa. The SSKH model considering the effect of neighbor's opinion and neighbor's social relationship on individuals. On the other hand, some individuals outside the confidence bound can also communicate with each other's, that improved the classical bounded confidence model.The simulation analysis of homogeneous and heterogeneous models is carried out respectively,and the result improved that the SSKH model also show the opinion result of fragment, polarization and consensus, while it takes longer time to reach consensus compared to classical KH model for the sake of introduction of social diversity that makes the model more realistic. Social similarity have impact on opinion evolution, the appropriate similarity threshold value will make the opinion easier to reach consensus. In heterogeneous model, when the confidence bound are related to similarity threshold the model achieve better opinion convergence result, and even better than homogeneous SSKH model, which provides theoretical basis and ideas to lead public opinion in real life.