Trust, opinion diffusion and radicalization in social networks

Gossiping models have increasingly been applied to study social network phenomena. In this context, this paper is specifically concerned with modeling how opinions of social agents can be radicalized if the agents interact more strongly with neighbors that share their beliefs. In our model, each agent´s belief is represented by a vector of probabilities that a given state is true. The agents average their opinions with that of their neighbors over time, giving more weight to opinions that are closer to their current beliefs. The increasing trust that may exist among likeminded agents is modeled through a weight that is a monotonically decreasing function of the distance in opinion. We consider a continuous (soft) and a discontinuous (hard) model for the weight and analyze the convergence properties.