Category: Network Sci.

Summary: Measuring how zealot formation slows consensus in a persistent voter model on two-dimensional lattices.

The voter model is a basic framework for opinion coarsening, where neighboring agents copy one another until consensus is reached. This experiment studies a persistent variant in which agents can become zealots after enough same-opinion reinforcement, making them resistant to further change.

The simulation compares the standard voter model with several zealot-formation thresholds on square lattices. It measures how consensus times scale with system size and whether the system crosses over from ordinary voter coarsening to a much slower or partially frozen regime as zealots become easier to create.

That is relevant because stubbornness and memory are common in real social dynamics, but their effect on scaling laws is not fully mapped. The project turns that intuition into a quantitative finite-size slowdown measurement.

Method: Repeated 2D lattice voter-model simulations with zealot formation thresholds, comparing consensus-time scaling across system sizes.

What is measured: Consensus time, scaling with system size, dependence on zealot threshold, and crossover from standard coarsening to slowed or frozen dynamics.