Sociocultural Influences on Opinion Formation: Word of Mouth Dynamics, Mass Media and Behavioural Development

arXiv:2607.15968 (physics)

Abstract:We study a society of agents belonging to a number of occupational or cultural groups that form opinions about others' situation in the same or different group. Opinions develop either by observation within own group or by directly interacting with members of other groups, therefore by word of mouth (WoM). Additionally, global mass media (MM) may be available that inform indirectly about the situation of the various groups. The sociocultural interplay of these processes and the degrees of relative exposure to each of the sources has diversified effects on final opinion and social attitude formation. In large and complex societies and groups where not everyone can physically interact by WoM with everyone about everything, these processes show potential for mass control and social automation engineering. Our model can also represent and be generally informative about segmented societies that consist of groups with different occupational and cultural characteristics and it can offer insights into social issues such as the generation gap, social cleavages and so on.

Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2607.15968 [physics.soc-ph]

(or arXiv:2607.15968v1 [physics.soc-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15968 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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