Dynamics of Expressed and Private Opinion Evolution Over Issue Sequences

The cognitive inertia of sociology, similar to the inertia of physics, plays a significant role on the opinions formulation. In a general way, each individual possesses both a private and an expressed opinion in social networks. In this article, we propose a novel model with expressed and private opinions over issue sequences to capture cognitive inertia. The persistent disagreement and consensus for opinion dynamics over issue sequences are studied by the network structure and the social power evolutions. Moreover, we consider the opinion evolutions over issue sequences with bounded confidence. It is shown that the private opinions and the expressed opinions can also achieve consensus. By our proposed issue-sequence-based opinion dynamics model, the social phenomenon of cognitive freezing can be reproduced. The simulation analysis reveals that the convergence rates for the discrepancy of individuals are inversely proportional to the social powers of individuals, and the number of issue sequences for opinions achieving consensus is inversely proportional to the confidence thresholds and directly proportional to the number of individuals.