Modern societies rely heavily on group decision, but the part of what makes for healthy faith communities is a sense that all members feel heard. That is why finding consensus is very important in many branches of social life - from very personal problems (like religion, abortion, etc.) to economic problems (like marketing, investments, etc.). Recently both sociologists and physicists have tried to find out when a complete consensus from initially diverging opinion emerges. In this paper we propose a model which allows to discriminiate between two kinds of behavior, connected with areas which we call personal and economic. It seems that an attitude with regard to the personal area spreads in a different way than that with regard to the economic area. Thus, we assume that each agent tries to influence its neighbors, but in the personal area the information flows inward from the neighborhood (like in most opinion dynamic models), whereas in the economic area the information flows outward from the agent or group of agents to the neighborhood (like in the Sznajd model [1]).
In 2000 we proposed a new model [1] of opinion formation named by Stauffer the Sznajd model (SM). The model has found many applications - from politics to finance and marketing. For the review of the model and its applications see [2-7] and refs. therein. We assumed that individual opinion is represented by an Ising spin (yes or no), like in many opinion dynamics models. The really new thing that we introduced was the dynamics of spins. The motivation to propose this new dynamics was a phenomenon called by social psychologists the Social Validation - one fundamental way that we decide what to do in a situation is to look to what others are doing. A group of people sharing the same opinion influences the neighborhood much easier than isolated individuals. On the other hand, it seems that social validation phenomena works much weaker in private aspects of life, such as religion. These attitudes are mostly influenced by the family or friends. For this reason we believe that to model the evolution of attitude to personal freedom one should use Glauber dynamics.
In this paper we will show that building consensus in personal life is much more difficult that in economics. On the other hand, the dynamics connected with economic freedom is much more complicated than the one connected with personal freedom. The model can be used to describe the formation of social attitude regarding economic freedom, i.e., whether the society prefers an open market or a state controlled market. We will also show how the personal attitudes and tolerance influence this formation process, a problem that is discussed in the behavioral finance literature [8].
References
[1] K. Sznajd-Weron, J. Sznajd, Opinion evolution in closed community. Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 11 (6), 1157-1165 (2000).
[2] D. Stauffer, Sociophysics - A review of recent Monte Carlo simulations. Fractals 11, 313-318 (2003).
[3] D. Stauffer, Sociophysics: the Sznajd model and its applications. Comput. Phys. Commun. 146 (1), 93-98 (2002).
[4] P. Richmond, L. Sabatelli, Langevin processes, agent models and socio-economic systems. Physica A 336, 27-38 (2004).
[5] A.T. Bernards, U.M.S. Costa, A.D. Araujo, D. Stauffer, Damage spreading, coarsening dynamics and distribution of political votes in Sznajd model on square lattic. Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 12 (2), 159-167 (2001).
[6] A.T. Bernardes, D. Stauffer, J. Kertesz, Election results and the Sznajd model on Barabasi network, Eur. Phys. J. B 25 (1), 123-127 (2002).
[7] C. Shulze, Advertising in the Sznajd marketing model. Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 14 (1), 95-98 (2003).
[8] D. Kahneman, A. Tversky, (eds.), Chaos, Values and Frames. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000. |