Emergence of opinion splits in the Sznajd model with latency

Abstract

In the modelling of social systems, opinion latency is the idea that once an agent changes its opinion, there will be a period of time where it is immune to other changes. When added to the voter model this leads to a situation where no matter how low the latency is or how many opinions are considered, all opinions end up in a coexistence where they are equally represented. In this work, we examine what happens when latency is added to the Sznajd model. What we find is that for low latency, the model behaves roughly like it does in the absence of latency, where one opinion will always eventually dominate. For high latency, the possibility for a symmetric coexistence of 2 opinions arises, but contrary to the voter model, a coexistence of more than 2 opinions is never stable. We provide evidence of this phenomenon with computer simulations of the model in Barabási-Albert networks, together with a mean field treatment that is able to capture the observed behavior. We argue that this could hint at an explanation for the prevalence of two opinion splits in the real world.