On social sensitivity to either zealot or independent minorities

Individuals act in their own self-interest, but in so doing contribute to the observed wellbeing of society, as determined using the self-organized temporal criticality (SOTC) model. This model identifies the timing of crucial events as a new mechanism with which to generate criticality, thereby establishing a way for the internal dynamics of the decision making process to suppress the sensitivity of social opinion to either zealot or independent minorities. We find that the sensitivity to the influence of zealots is much smaller than in the case of criticality with a fine tuning control parameter and the action of independent minorities may affect temporal complexity so as to realize the condition of ideal 1/f noise. (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.