Analysis of the Effect of Increasing Peer Pressure on Consensus Building

Abstract

This paper examines how the opinions of agents with innate beliefs change in the presence of gradually increasing peer pressure. Previous works have shown that agents’ opinions generally reach consensus as the peer pressure increases, but may oscillate without achieving consensus when the peer pressure increases too quickly. As this is a phenomenon often observed in the real world, this paper aims to clarify the characteristics of networks exhibiting such a phenomenon. In particular, for periodic connected undirected graphs, consensus is achieved when the peer pressure increases slowly, but consensus is not achieved when it increases rapidly.