  We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular,
we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to
consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social
psychology as it represents one of people's behaviors that emerges as a result
of their interactions. The proposed model represents agents, arranged in a
network and provided with an individual behavior, that change opinion in
function of those of their neighbors. In particular, agents can behave as
conformists or as nonconformists. In the former case, agents change opinion in
accordance with the majority of their social circle (i.e., their neighbors); in
the latter case, they do the opposite, i.e., they take the minority opinion.
Moreover, we investigate the nonconformity both on a global and on a local
perspective, i.e., in relation to the whole population and to the social circle
of each nonconformist agent, respectively. We perform a computational study of
the proposed model, with the aim to observe if and how the conformity affects
the related outcomes. Moreover, we want to investigate whether it is possible
to achieve some kind of equilibrium, or of order, during the evolution of the
system. Results highlight that the amount of nonconformist agents in the
population plays a central role in these dynamics. In particular, conformist
agents play the role of stabilizers in fully-connected networks, whereas the
opposite happens in complex networks. Furthermore, by analyzing complex
topologies of the agent network, we found that in the presence of radical
nonconformist agents the topology of the system has a prominent role; otherwise
it does not matter since we observed that a conformist behavior is almost
always more convenient. Finally, we analyze the results of the model by
considering that agents can change also their behavior over time.
