Modeling Opinion Dynamics

I joined Mechanical Engineering Professor Francesco Bullo’s lab as a EUREKA scholar, studying how different social network structures and people’s relationships (antagonistic or friendly) can influence the evolution of their opinions. I coded the Affine Boomerang model in MATLAB and observed trends in the updated opinions for star graphs and cycle graphs. The simulations suggest that people’s relationships influence whether they will come to agreement or polarize, as well as how fast they will reach one of these states, if at all. —