Reaching consensus on rumors

An important contribution in sociophysics is the Galam's model of rumors spreading. This model provides an explanation of rumors spreading in a population and explains some interesting social phenomena such as the diffusion of hoaxes. In this paper the model has been reformulated as a Markov process highlighting the stochastic nature of the phenomena. This formalization allows us to derive conditions for consensus to be reached and for the existence of some interesting phenomena such as the emergence of impasses. The proposed formulation allows a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the diffusion of rumors. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.