Kinetic Description of Social Dynamics: From Consensus to Flocking

Heterogeneity, minorities, and leaders in opinion formation

Fabio Fagnani

Politecnico di Torino

In this talk we consider opinion dynamics models where a minority of nodes is following an endogenous dynamics different from the rest of the network. Our main interest is to understand how this minority is affecting the dynamics of the rest of the network. This will clearly depend on the topology of the network and on the size of the minority, with possibly 'phase transition' type phenomena to be characterized. The talk will be rather speculative and we will only propose some initial theoretical results.