A Cognitive Inertia Sequence Model for Opinion Formation in Group Decision-Making Systems

Inspired by the empirical decision-making (EDM) phenomenon, wherein agents assimilate the opinion learned from social neighbors as their cognitive inertia and progressively rely on their own cognitive inertia sequence (CIS) for decision-making over time, we propose a novel CIS model paradigm and extend it based on the bounded confidence rule. In the extended CIS model, before agents obtain their acquired opinions, they will reconstruct the weight coefficients by evaluating the credibility of the opinions of social neighbors based on a comprehensive trust degree, composed of the opinion similarity and the centrality degree. Then, agents update their opinions through weighted aggregation of their CISs and acquired opinions. Finally, we apply the proposal to the Zachary?s karate club network, providing a comparison analysis between the extended CIS model and the HK model. Simulation results indicate that the number of opinion clusters increases as the trust threshold increases, and the extended CIS model has a shorter convergence time than the HK model, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed model.