Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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20 May 2007

Effect of Network Structure on Consensus

I was struck by a presentation by Qiming Lu at the NetSci conference on the dramatic effect of the micro-structure of social networks on consensus formation. Essentially, the results showed that creating random graphs with the same macro properties (clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, etc.) yielded vast differences in the final consensus state of a social network in an opinion spreading simulation.

Lu used social ties between actors to denote influences that individuals have on each other, with actors having certain probabilities of changing their opinion based on their neighbors' states and their current state. In the study, the authors randomly assigned individuals to start with different words for a single concept (called the naming game) to see how many words would exist in the steady state of the system.

In simulations on real world network structures, the authors found that actors would converge to using two words to describe a common concept, while replicating the same macro properties on a random graph yielded a consensus on one word. This has tremendous implications for how we characterize networks, since it points to a lack of a measure to capture certain features of naturally formed networks.

This also leads us to think about how we can combat groupthink, since these results imply that some larger social structures may exhibit some resistance towards groupthink. It is important to isolate these factors so that we can design our organizations and meetings to take advantage of these natural characteristics. Of course we do not randomly start with opinions, but form them over time as a function of those around us. However, these results may strengthen the notion that independent opinion formation followed by social discussion effectively combats groupthink, as has been previously demonstrated in smaller systems.

They have presented some of their results previously, in the paper Dynamics of Naming Games in Random Geometric Networks, but their NetSci paper will hopefully be available online soon.

Posted by Ben Waber at May 20, 2007 2:25 PM

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