Social consensus and tipping points with opinion inertia

Abstract

When opinions, behaviors or ideas diffuse within a population, some are invariably stickier than others. The stickier the opinion, behavior or idea, the greater is an individual's inertia to replace it with an alternative. Here we study the effect of stickiness of opinions in a two-opinion model, where individuals change their opinion only after a certain number of consecutive encounters with the alternative opinion. Assuming that one opinion has a fixed stickiness, we investigate how the critical size of the competing opinion required to tip over the entire population varies as a function of the competing opinion's stickiness. We analyze this scenario for the case of a complete-graph topology through simulations, and through a semi-analytical approach which yields an upper bound for the critical minority size. We present analogous simulation results for the case of the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random network. Finally, we investigate the coarsening properties of sticky opinion spreading on two-dimensional lattices, and show that the presence of stickiness gives rise to an effective surface tension that causes the coarsening behavior to become curvature-driven.