Fig. 2

The influence of user similarity and social status on consensus dynamics. The plots show the mean size (100 runs) of the agents’ inventories (y-axes) in relation to the number of interactions (x-axes) for Reddit Movies (a) and StackExchange English (b) datasets. Each line represents results for one particular \(\gamma\) and \(\beta\). The line colors represent three values of \(\gamma\) and line markers three different values of \(\beta.\) We notice that in (modular, egalitarian) and (closed, egalitarian) societies (marked with blue and red lines with circle markers), opinion convergence rates are slower than in (open, egalitarian) society marked with green and circle markers. This indicates that as soon as user similarity plays a role, consensus building is delayed. However, in (modular, ranked) and (closed, ranked) societies (blue and red lines with diamond markers) we observe faster consensus building. This means that by increasing the effect of social status, we are able to partially compensate the negative effect of similarity. By further increasing the impact of the social status through the stratification factor, the positive effect of social status dissolves. This is visible in the green, blue and red lines with star markers corresponding to (open, stratified), (modular, stratified) and (closed, stratified) societies. Thus, for a faster consensus building, a careful balancing between the influence of similarity and social status is needed. a Reddit Movies, b StackExchange English