摘要：Abstract Background Communication and sharing of opinions play a crucial role in shaping the views of a person in a society. Interactions with other people enable a person to interpret their views and expound his opinion. Ordinarily, people tend to change their opinions in compliance with those having significantly higher expertise thereby leading to a bipartite society of two intellectual groups i.e. mavens (highly intellectual and confident people) and laypeople (diffident people with little or no experience and knowledge). However, the sharing of information in a group is influenced by the weight of advice with which people consider opinion of others and several control factors like interaction procedure adopted, possibility of mutual exchange of information, and the time at which information is updated. Moreover, the effects of these factors are observable in both physical and digital societies during opinion formation. This study is build upon the prior work of Moussad et al. (PLoS ONE 8:78433, 2013). Findings In this study, we use agent based modeling to analyze five types of interaction (including ideal cases) using an integrated selection process to empirically investigate the influence of above mentioned control factors in such a society. Through the simulations, we identify the minimum number of iterations required to reach an agreement in such a group of people and the critical proportion of the respective group to become observable in the opinion formation under different scenarios. Conclusions We observe that increasing the weight of advice has a positive effect on the quality of consensus reached as well as the speed of convergence of crowd towards an opinion. Furthermore, the interaction procedure adopted plays a dominant role in demarcating the critical proportions of the groups to dominate the consensus.
关键词：Agent based modeling;Opinion formation;Social influence
