Higher order interactions destroy phase transitions in Deffuant opinion dynamics model

Abstract: We define a higher order Deffuant model by generalizing the original pairwise interaction model for bounded-confidence opinion-dynamics to interactions involving a group of agents of size k. The generalized model is naturally encoded in a hypergraph. We study this dynamics in different hypergraph topologies, from random hypergraph ensembles, to spatially embedded hyper-lattices. We show that including higher order interactions induces a drastic change in the onset of consensus for random hypergraphs; instead of the sharp phase transition, characteristic of the dyadic Deffuant model, the system undergoes a smooth size independent crossover to consensus, as the confidence value increases. This phenomenon is absent from regular hypergraphs, which conserve a phase transition.