Equilibrium and dynamics of a three-state opinion model

Abstract: We introduce a three-state model to study the effects of a neutral party on opinion spreading, in which the tendency of agents to agree with their neighbors can be tuned to favor either the neutral party or two oppositely polarized parties, and can be disrupted by social agitation mimicked as temperature. We study the equilibrium phase diagram and the non-equilibrium stochastic dynamics of the model with various analytical approaches and with Monte Carlo simulations on different substrates: the fully-connected (FC) graph, the one-dimensional (1D) chain, and Erd\"os-R\'enyi (ER) random graphs. We show that, in the mean-field approximation, the phase boundary between the disordered and polarized phases is characterized by a tricritical point. On the FC graph, in the absence of social agitation, kinetic barriers prevent the system from reaching optimal consensus. On the 1D chain, the main result is that the dynamics is governed by the growth of opinion clusters. Finally, for the ER ensemble a phase transition analogous to that of the FC graph takes place, but now the system is able to reach optimal consensus at low temperatures, except when the average connectivity is low, in which case dynamical traps arise from local frozen configurations.