Human labeling behavior in social networks with opinion formation

Human labeling behavior describes the social phenomenon according to which humans label each other as friends or foes according to their opinions or attitudes on some issues. An opinion model with the confidence threshold epsilon and the heterogeneous convergence rates of opinion and trust indexes is proposed to capture the coevolution and the interaction between human labeling behavior and the opinion formation. By analyzing the signs configuration, we find that human labeling behavior tends to make people be friends and let the society meet the social balance theory. Furthermore, the system with the heterogeneous structure is more robust in the human labeling behavior than that with the homogeneous structure. Also, we study the opinion distribution and find that human labeling behavior plays a positive role in keeping the diversity of opinion in society. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2020.