论文标题
复杂世界中意见形成的脆弱性
The fragility of opinion formation in a complex world
论文作者
论文摘要
触手可及的大量高质量信息，许多人如何认为地球是平坦而疫苗接种有害的？在这个问题的激励下，我们量化了意见形成机制的含义，即一个不知情的观察者逐渐形成了关于一个由签名的相互信任和不信任网络相关的主体组成的世界的观点。我们在数字上和分析上表明，观察者的观点高度不一致（它们往往独立于观察者的初始意见）和不稳定（它们表现出广泛的随机变化）。意见不一致和不稳定与受试者数量所代表的世界复杂性的增加，可以通过适当扩大观察者的初始信息来预防。我们的发现意味着，即使最初信任可靠的信息来源的个人，如果至少存在可信的和欺骗性的来源之间至少存在少数信托关系，则最终可能会信任欺骗性的信息。
With vast amounts of high-quality information at our fingertips, how is it possible that many people believe that the Earth is flat and vaccination harmful? Motivated by this question, we quantify the implications of an opinion formation mechanism whereby an uninformed observer gradually forms opinions about a world composed of subjects interrelated by a signed network of mutual trust and distrust. We show numerically and analytically that the observer's resulting opinions are highly inconsistent (they tend to be independent of the observer's initial opinions) and unstable (they exhibit wide stochastic variations). Opinion inconsistency and instability increase with the world complexity represented by the number of subjects, which can be prevented by suitably expanding the observer's initial amount of information. Our findings imply that even an individual who initially trusts credible information sources may end up trusting the deceptive ones if at least a small number of trust relations exist between the credible and deceptive sources.
