Fig 1.
Social interactions between individuals (green) explicitly capture social effects (e.g. peer-pressure), with each the cognitive state of each individual being captured by a belief network (purple).
Fig 2.
(a) and (b) reflect response scores for each question for current and desirable (future) state respectively.
Color coding reflects the theme of the question. Central mark in each box plot, with top and bottom box edges, correspond to the median, the 25th and the 75th percentile respectively. Markers outside the box correspond to outliers.
Fig 3.
Belief network for a given individual, where each node corresponds to a belief and links corresponds to belief associations.
Boxes corresponds to typical survey scores, with upper box leading to belief m being allocated a “+” (“more of the same”) while belief l is allocated a “-” (“less of the same”). Consequently, an association between similarly signed beliefs (e.g. belief k and l) is considered as positive (solid line), with opposite signs (e.g. belief l and m) resulting to a negative associations (dotted line).
Fig 4.
Evolution of average cognitive coherence (blue) and network coherence (red) across time (x-axis) during the belief exchange process at (a) γ = 0 (social rank is the sole determining factor), (b) γ = 0.5 (social rank and peer-pressure have equal weighting) and γ = 1 (peer-pressure is the sole determining factor).
Note that values begin at 1 due to perfect initial coherence across agents. Band around each plot corresponds to the standard error across twelve independent runs.
Fig 5.
Impact of varying γ at the (a) network and (b) individual level, using network coherence and average cognitive coherence respectively.
Similar to Fig 4, values begin at 1 due to perfect initial coherence across agents.
Fig 6.
Quantifying the magnitude of varying γ by capturing the relative difference between tis two extreme manifestation (i.e. γ = 0 and γ = 1) at two levels—network (red) and individual (blue) level.
Fig 7.
Trajectory of E at different values of γ, where solid and dotted weights represent positive and negative E values respectively.
Fig 8.
(a) Network coherence and (b) average cognitive coherence under two distinct hierarchical structures—A ‘flat’ hierarchy (green plot) and a ‘vertical’ hierarchy (yellow plot).
The empirically-obtained hierarchical structure is included for reference (blue line). Results corresponds to the case of γ = 0.5.