Physics – Physics and Society
Scientific paper
2011-09-07
Physics
Physics and Society
21 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to New Journal of Physics
Scientific paper
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. However, this is not necessarily the case, even though we are all exposed to information flow through various channels of the media, i.e. newspapers, television, radio, internet, and web. Sociologists think this happens because individuals get conflicting information from the mass media and they hold different attitudes toward the information, i.e. external and personal factors affect the opinion of an individual. The attitudes are in turn variant because of their cultural, educational, and environmental differences. In this paper we shall investigate the dynamical development of opinion in a population of agents by using a computational model of opinion formation in a co-evolving or adaptive network of socially linked agents. The personal and external effects are taken into account by assigning an individual attitude parameter to each agent and by subjecting all to an external but homogeneous field to mimic the effect of mass media. We relate the findings of the model study to actual data on scientific perception surveys carried out in two different populations. Quite peculiarly we find that scientifically sound concepts are more difficult to acquire than concepts not validated by science, since opposing individuals organize themselves in close communities that prevent opinion consensus.
Barrio Rafael A.
Iñiguez Gerardo
Kaski Kimmo K.
Tagüeña-Martínez Julia
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