Disagreement and Polarization for Extended DeGroot Opinion Dynamics Model in Social Networks

In the real world, the individuals are not easy to fully accept new knowledge from the other individuals since the the cognitive ability or learning ability of the individuals. In this paper, an extended DeGroot model is proposed to study the evolution of opinions in the social networks. It is shown that the opinion is antagonistic if the network is strongly connected, and sufficient conditions for the opinion reaching disagreement and polarization are obtained in terms of the structure of the social networks. Moreover, we apply the extended model to address the public opinion event heat problem. Finally, a case study that learning scenario is worked out to illustrate the effectiveness of the opinion dynamics model.