Speaker
Description
Discontinuous phase transitions are a desirable phenomenon in models of opinion dynamics because they capture abrupt shifts in collective behavior, critical mass effects, and social hysteresis. These transitions help explain real-world phenomena such as political polarization, the persistence of vaccine hesitancy, and delayed responses to policy changes. Therefore, identifying the conditions that lead to such transitions is crucial for understanding real-world opinion dynamics. In our previous work, we showed that replacing an annealed (situation-based) approach with a quenched (personality-based) approach in the multistate q-voter model with anticonformity on a complete graph can induce a discontinuous phase transition. This is surprising, as quenched disorder is typically expected to smooth out or eliminate such transitions. This puzzling result immediately raised the question of whether this effect can be observed only on the complete graph or also on other structures. In this talk, I will address this question by presenting completely new results, which I hope will intrigue the audience as much as they intrigued us.
