Fang Wu of the Applied Physics Department, Stanford University, and Bernardo A. Huberman of HP Labs have published their results on Social Structure and Opinion Formation, “a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which in-
dividuals are embedded.” Huberman noted in email to me that “the notion of a tipping point in opinion formation does not seem very sound,” although the results do support the notion that highly-connected individuals can speed the spread of opinions through social networks. The researchers’ predictions were verified by computer experiments.
Reputation and Opinion in Social Networks
- July 11th, 2004
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by Regine
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Comments
@ 15:16
this sort of fit in with my hypothesis about how certain meds work: for example, i had a great discussion with Dr. Finacane at Johns Hopkins years ago during a geriatrics conference that medicine like aricept do not work and that the statistics are skewed by large pharmaceutical companies into creating a cloud of science that creates the tempo towards getting as many persons onto a medicine as possible: i got a rough disorganized but well thought out on how to collect data from the front line caregiver network on mamamusings web page: been toying around with some of the concepts i learned from your book and found some great lectures on this p2p thing to deepen my understanding: i think that persons develop judgements on how a medine works as a specific research item can show how persons develop something as complex as clinical judgement: that companies use marketing and scetchy statistics is very fishy: i have recorded images of how the drug company uses physician profiles to influence a perscribing “Fad.” Not to minimize how medicine helps persons, but they do use a form of social networking to make sure that the numbers of a particular medicine perscibed continue:
thanks for you support and posting information that is very helpful and quoteable.
stef
ps: paul got in touch and is interested in the geolocation of toxic waste sousavaillence: got some ideas on how to go from there towards an overall sousavaillence infrastructure…
s
@ 00:37
I would think that well connected individuals not only act in a way so as to amplify certain types of ideas, but they also act as dampers on other types of ideas which they choose not to pass on or even negatively comment on.
The existence of a tipping point in opinion formation will become evident when a critical mass of interconnected individuals has been reached.
The authors cite the problem with “the prediction that given an initial set of possible opinions, the information cascade will lead to one opinion eventually becoming pervasive, which contradicts the common observation that conformity throughout a society tends to be localized in subgroups rather than widespread.
As society gets more and more connected, what is today seen as subgroups will be a more and more homogenous distribution for humanity as a whole.
@ 03:39
More and more connected society reached the noosphere. Good and interesting idea.