Raul Rechtman — Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México #
 Bifurcations, chaos, and disorder in models of societies of contrarians and conformists #
People are often divided into conformists and contrarians,
the former tending to align to the majority opinion in their
neighborhood and the latter tending to disagree with that majority. In
practice, however, the contrarian tendency is rarely followed when
there is an overwhelming majority with a given opinion, so we speak of
reasonable contrarians.  We present the opinion dynamics of a society
of conformists and reasonable contrarians where each agent can express
one of two opinions.  The model is a cellular automaton of Ising type.
In the mean field approximation the model exhibits bifurcations and a
chaotic phase, interpreted as coherent oscillations of the whole
society. We study the model on Watts-Strogatz networks and on scale
free networks.  In these cases, we use a suitably defined entropy to
characterize disorder.