Vector Opinion Dynamics: An Extended Model for Consensus in Social Networks

Most people hold a variety of opinions on different topics ranging from sports, entertainment, spiritual beliefs to moral principles. These can be based on personal reflections or on their interactions with others. How do we influence others in our social network and how do they influence us and how do we reach consensus? In this paper, we present our investigations based on the use of multiple opinions (a vector of opinions) that should be considered to determine consensus in a society. We have extended Deffuant model and have tested our model on top of two well-known network topologies the Barabasi-Albert network and the Erdos-Renyi network. We have implemented a two phase filtering process determining the consensus.