Anticonformity or Independence?-Insights from Statistical Physics

The aim of this paper is to examine how different types of social influence, introduced on the microscopic (individual) level, manifest on the macroscopic level, i.e. in the society. The inspiration for this task came mainly from two sources-social psychology that recognize two different types of nonconformity (anticonformity and independence) and the observation related to the agent-based modeling that was verbalized in 2002 by Macy and Willer that there was a little effort to provide analysis of how results differ depending on the model designs. To achieve the goal, we propose a generalized model of opinion dynamics, that as a special cases reduces to the linear voter model, Sznajd model, q-voter model and the majority rule. We use the model to examine the differences, that appear at the macroscopic level, under the influence of two types of nonconformity, introduced on the microscopic level. We answer the question if the observed differences are universal or model dependent.