Competition Among Reputations in the 2D Sznajd Model: Spontaneous Emergence of Democratic States

We propose a modification in the Sznajd sociophysics model defined on the square lattice. For this purpose, we consider reputation-a mechanism limiting the agents' persuasive power. The reputation is introduced as a time-dependent score, which can be positive or negative. This mechanism avoids dictatorship (full consensus, all spins parallel) for a wide range of model parameters. We consider two different situations: case 1, in which the agents' reputation increases for each persuaded neighbor, and case 2, in which the agents' reputation increases for each persuasion and decreases when a neighbor keeps his opinion. Our results show that the introduction of reputation avoids full consensus even for initial densities of up spins greater than 1/2. The relaxation times follow a log-normal-like distribution in both cases, but they are larger in case 2 due to the competition among reputations. In addition, we show that the usual phase transition occurs and depends on the initial concentration d of individuals with the same opinion, but the critical points d(c) in the two cases are different.