Contact Patterns and Aggregate Opinion Levels - Results from a Simulation Study

In the last ten years, sociologists, social psychologists and physical scientists have developed opinion change models where influence is exerted through social ties. The goal of our paper is to investigate the effect of contact patterns on the number of individuals within a group who share the same opinion. We present an opinion formation model, simulate opinion formation in eight different kinds of networks and present the results. We find that contact patterns can have large effects on agreement levels. For example, individuals in tree networks display low levels of agreement. Basic statistical descriptors of network structure, such as density, correlate with group agreement in our simulated data. We also found that dummy variables indicating type of network have statistically significant effects, suggesting that additional unmeasured features of the network contribute to agreement in our simulations.