q-Voter model with non-conformers
One of the differences between how social scientists and sociophysicists view the modeling of social systems is the outlook towards independent behavior. Importance of individuality underlies many theories in social sciences, while physicists are used to explain various emergent properties through interactions. Obviously both approaches are oversimplifications of objective reality. This time we consider another generalization of the q-Voter model in which a group of physicists and social scientists attempted to bridge this gap.
Two years ago we have already explained that properties of individual agents in some cases do not matter, because they average out. This is obviously true if we build models from perspective of physics. But if we include intuitions from social sciences, then this "truth" might no longer be true. Thus in some cases minute details about individuality of agents can have interesting effects on the dynamics of the modeled social systems.
So here we discuss a generalization of the q-Voter model using so-called diamond model of social response [1]. An interesting result reported in [1] is that two different psycho-social approaches to non-conformative behavior generate somewhat different results when introduced into the q-Voter model.