Today I read a paper titled “Irrelevance of information outflow in opinion dynamics models”
The abstract is:
The Sznajd model for opinion dynamics has attracted a large interest as a simple realization of the psychological principle of social validation
As its most salient feature, it has been claimed that the Sznajd model is qualitatively different from other ordering processes, because it is the only one featuring outflow of information as opposed to inflow
We show that this claim is unfounded by presenting a generalized zero-temperature Glauber-type of dynamics which yields results indistinguishable from those of the Sznajd model
In one-dimension we also derive an exact expression for the exit probability of the Sznajd model, that turns out to coincide with the result of an analytical approach based on the Kirkwood approximation
This observation raises interesting questions about the applicability and limitations of this approach