Fig. 7: Scaling of opinion stability in empirical worlds.

Opinion stability achieved in subsets of progressively increasing size by the random neighbor rule (a, b) and the majority rule (c, d). Subsets have been obtained by sampling from corresponding empirical signed networks. The boxplots summarize opinion stability values obtained for 100 independent seed opinions (boxes show quartiles of the data and whiskers extend to 1.5 of the inter-quartile range; outlier data points beyond the whisker range are shown individually). In parallel with the results on synthetic relation networks, opinion stability decreases with N (opinion stability–world complexity tension). The decrease is slower for the majority rule than for the random neighbor rule.