Abstract:

The relationship between individual’s uncertainty and pluralism of the social group’s opinion, which is of great importance in understanding the social opinion evolution process as well as the macroscopic-law of social groups shaping from individual microscopic-characteristics, is still not known very clearly. Thus, the effect of individual-uncertainty on the emergence of social pluralism is evaluated by quantifying the scope and degree of individual-uncertainty, and establishing the part persistence model combined with bounded confidence based on the framework of the Hegselmann-Krause model. By adjusting the extent of individual-uncertainty, the simulation analyses that are applied to the single-subject, homogeneous-group, and heterogeneous-group levels, quantitatively and comprehensively reveal that the pluralism of the groupopinion is significantly modulated by the scope and degree of individual-uncertainty. Furthermore, by assessing the dependence of individual-uncertainty on individual-opinion in social groups, the evolution of group-opinion is investigated under the three classical distributions of initial individual-opinions. The simulation results indicat that the pluralism of group-opinion is prone to be formulated when the individual-opinion is in uniform/normal distribution, whereas it would be infrequently to formulate the group-opinion pluralism to the individual-opinion in extreme distribution. All these results together demonstrate the basic rule of the social group-opinion evolution.