Computer Analysis of Qualitative Features in the Formation of the Socio-Ideological Structure of Society
The goal of the present paper is to develop a special methodology for analyzing and forecasting mass social interactions; the methodology can be used in various studies of how social positions and opinions of the population are formed. The paper proposes a technique of mathematical modeling of mass social interactions in the context of a comprehensive interplay of social contacts, under the impact of information channels and the external environment. The model is based on substantial ideas about cause-effect relationships between the size of social groups and their changes as a result of mutual transitions, the ideas about how the views of other participants and various media influence socio-psychological attitudes, and about possible external impact on the effectiveness of propaganda. In contrast to commonly used differential equations focusing on the analysis of the stationary state, we propose to analyze the group size dynamics with the use of simple modifications of Markov chains when participants do not move from one group to another uniformly, but are distributed through several time periods, and the probabilities of such a transition depend on the current state. For this purpose, computer programs that express the iterative procedures of Markov chains with additional intermediate states are used. An important feature that distinguishes our approach from other models consists in the reliance on a sociological theory that requires social behavior be considered as dependent on variables such as socio-psychological attitudes of members of social groups. Our work also takes into account the factors that determine the attitudes, namely social contacts between people and information channels of different types available to the participants. With the help of simulation calculations, we show how this attitude may affect the inter-group transitions in the formation of a socio-ideological structure of society. In general, these models are a kind of situational stand where we can study the features of formation of the ideological structure of society. If statistical or expert data are available, then the model we have developed can be used to analyze regional socio-political issues.