Deffuant model on a ring with repelling mechanism and circular opinions.

Abstract

We investigate a Deffuant model on a ring by introducing two modifications: the repelling mechanism and the circular opinions. The repelling mechanism drives the opinions of two individuals away from each other and the circular opinions are defined on a circle. We find that the repelling mechanism tends to polarize the opinions of adjacent individuals and the circular opinions bring up a spatiotemporal pattern in which all individuals take different opinions but the opinion difference between two neighboring individuals tends to zero in the limit of the population size. In the Deffuant model with both repelling mechanism and the circular opinions, opinion dynamics depends on both the bounded confidence and the convergence rate. The interplay between the repelling mechanism and the circular opinion may give rise to time-dependent opinion dynamics.